[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Kara, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Well, thank you for having me. It’s great to be here and I’ve just enjoyed talking to you for the last ten minutes about all things toxicity. So I look forward to jumping in and talking to your audience.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Absolutely. Yea, I don’t know if it’s a passion of yours. It’s been a little bit of a passion of mine. Toxins and everything. I heard you on a detox summit and it was a great interview you did there. It was one of the better ones on toxicity. That’s why I reached out to you. It would be great to have a discussion with you about it. So, how did you first connect with the topic of toxicity? Where did it come around for you? Is it something you came across in your practice a lot? How did that whole interest start for you?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : That’s a good question, Damien. I did my post-doctorate training at Metametrixs Clinical Lab in Atlanta Georgia. Metametrixs was later, not too long ago, it was purchased by Genova. If you are familiar with Genova, they’re running Metametrixs suite of testing. Metametrixs, it was studying the toxins from a laboratory perspective; and also being part of the medical education team. Not only lecturing, but speaking. Doing consultations with doctors all of the time about the toxic burden. Incidentally, I was also in my clinical practice, and have been all along, so using it in practice. But, I came into the study of toxins from opposed to stuck in a lab.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great, great. In your practice, is this something that you come across quite often? You’re in integrative medicine. I should just take a step back a little bit. We haven’t really talked about integrative medicine. We had Jeffery Bland talking about what functional medicine is. What is integrative medicine in comparison?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] Another really good question. It’s always important to define terms. I imagine you could ask twenty of us who say that we’re integrative or functional and you’ll get little variations of definitions. So, integrative is sort of an over-arching definition that I think acknowledges the value in all forms of medicine. I am trained as a naturopathic physician. We do indeed prescribe medication when it’s indicated, but my core training is in taking a natural approach. As we used to say, removing the obstacles of cure. Working in foundational wellness and health and healing and nutrients and so forth. And then, if medications are indicated, you step in. Or if surgery is indicated, you step in. An integrative approach really quite simply; is acknowledging the value and when to use all of these systems of medicine that we have. A traditional or a conventional western approach, a traditional naturopathic approach. You can pull in paradata. You can pull in traditional Chinese medicine. As you are trained, and as it’s indicated with a given patient. That’s integrative medicine. Now, within that, is functional medicine. For me, functional medicine is a way for us to practice systems medicine. Most functional medicine practitioners would say that they’re integrative. That’s the larger picture. And then, you drill down into particular approaches. For me, functional medicine is a model of being able to practice systems. It’s a way of data capturing, of analyzing the patient that enables us to step back. Actually, Dr. Bland, Jeff Bland, has said “from telescope to microscopes”. You want to look at the being and their environment and then you want to drill down to the molecular level. That’s an incredibly careful and detailed history. To actually be able to capture that, you need a good structure. So, the institute of functional medicine has the matrix and this is a fabulous tool that you use in your chart note. The matrix for capturing systems medicine. Of course, actually; let me go over here and tack on to that what Jeff Bland said. Obviously, you are looking at the being and function and you’re correcting those imbalances. You’re correcting the dysfunction to restore wellness.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Basically, you come from two schools. The traditional medicine schools that we know is hospitals and so on, and you’ve also studied the functional medicine and some of our naturopathic and alternative sides as well. You just try to use whichever tool you think is relative to the situation. That sounds like the best of all worlds. Sounds like the best approach. I would say that’s really the kind of approach we like to get covered on here. Where it’s just taking whatever works and whatever context without any allegiance whatever to any. There’s a little bit of politics and fan stuff going on as always does go on in health. There’s all these different modalities which fit different situations. It sounds really like the best of all worlds. In terms of toxicity, when you’re addressing that, is it more on a functional medicine side? Or would you find a bit of a mix of everything?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] :Addressing toxicity. What do you mean from a functional perspective?

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : What I’m just trying to understand how you approach the whole thing. For instance, when a patient walks into your practice, and you typically decide that there’s some element of toxicity involved in their problems. Where would that come from? Would that come from one discipline or is it like a bit from everywhere?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] :Well, I would say that, conventional medicine. The conventional western model, doesn’t acknowledge the influence of toxins in the disease process. Sufficiently, yet. The data are completely irrefutable, so there’s some movement towards that. It would be as a functional medicine doctor. Baseline, anybody walking into my office has a toxic burden. That has been well established. Anyone coming in to my practice, I know, has a toxic burden. That toxins are influencing the course of disease that they’re presenting with. Most of the individuals that come to see me in my practice have something complex and chronic. I know that toxins are playing a part of that, but the question becomes, for me, as the clinician, in my analysis. My detailed analysis of the patient. Both history and lab, is to what extent are toxins influencing this person’s disease process. Therefore, in terms of our treatment, how immediately and how aggressively are we going to address them? Always a toxic burden, always influencing the course of disease. In fact, when you restore it. When you take a functional, sort of a systems approach, to treating somebody. You take care of their diet and you make sure their nutrients are appropriate. Those extremely fundamental steps are helping release the toxic burden. Toxins are always addressed in my practice. All of those foundational things are addressing the toxic load that we all have. But then, the second piece becomes, once we go in there and do that foundational assessment and treatment. Do we need to then, chelate… move into a more aggressive detox protocol? Do further laboratory evaluations and so forth. For all of the folks who come to see me, incidentally Damien, I do assess, as I talked about on the detox summit. Everybody, I look at whole blood metals and it’s a screening tool.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : So you do that test with everyone who comes into your practice?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yea. I sure do. I’m always screening for stuff. You know that whole bloods are reflective of current exposure; going on in their life now. But it’s a screening tool. Then, we’ll go on and do further assessment as I deem appropriate from taking the history.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : So, that’s kind of your baseline. Okay, great. You are saying basically this applies to people of chronic, complex conditions which you tend to treat. Would you say that there’s other people who should think of this also? I’m thinking how far should it go? Like if someone’s athletic performance isn’t as good. Or if their mental performance isn’t as good. Or if they’re just someone normally who’s a bit tired these days, but it’s not, they haven’t classified themselves as actually ill yet. Or, are not going to see doctors about it, but they just don’t feel in top form and are not doing so well in general. Are these the types of symptoms or are there specific symptoms that anyone who doesn’t feel like they’re in a chronic condition yet should look at? As a pointer that this may be something that they should look at.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yea. Absolutely. Let me underline it. Let me scream this from the rooftops. We all have a toxic burden. Period. We all do. We’ve all been exposed to toxin. We’ll have an influence in the course of our wellness. We want to consider them. Now, in my practice, most of the individuals who see me happen to have complex chronic disease. That’s just, that’s my training. That’s who I work with.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Right, right.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Those individuals, absolutely have a toxic burden. We all do, and there are steps that we all need to take to ensure that we minimize our toxin exposures. As well as our body’s ability to detox. I would say an emphatic yes. To optimize athletic performance you would absolutely want to consider the toxic burden. Or to a little bit of brain fog. So, going back to your question to me. What are some typical signs and symptoms you might see? Certainly, fatigue. Actually, fatigue would be a piece of the puzzle. Brain fog is a pretty classic first type of sign. Allergic disease. When you look at the literature on the impact of toxins, you will see allergies screaming. A lot of the organo- toxins- BPAs, phthalates, parabens, etc., etc. A lot of those, the first reaction is some sort of allergic reaction. That’s because the body wants it out. You’re exposed to something toxic, you sneeze. Or you develop a rash. It’s this reactive response to some bad thing trying to come in.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : You are saying. Would that be like rashes, would that be some tiredness responses to foods? Could it also be like sneezing, like hay fever kind of things?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. They’re broad, and generally speaking, they’re non-specific. Endocrine disruption is another potential reaction. Hypothyroidism, hormonal irregularities. Estrogen dominance and so forth. All of these things can be influenced by toxins. Really almost any symptom can have a toxic burden. This is because when you drill down to the molecular level. When you look at what toxins are actually doing in the body at the molecular level. One of the fundamental lesions is increased oxidized stress. You are causing that fundamental imbalance in the mitochondria. In tissue. Towards different tissue. They’re just doing this fundamental damage process. But, depending on the type of toxin, you can get some idea of symptoms. But, they’re still broad, Damien. I hope that I’m making sense.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Yea. It’s still an area we’re investigating and exploring. One of the ways I look at it, is like, these are basically molecules. The only reasons they’re toxins is because they are unnatural to our body. Our body’s made up of certain types of molecules and atoms. These come into the body and just because of the way chemistry is. Biochemistry is, they connect with, they disrupt, and they change in some cases, how things are working in our body. Because instead of selenium we have some other toxin which is binding to something in our body which it shouldn’t be. It’s kind of like distorting how our bodies are supposed to work. Therefore, they start to work in different ways. Which means we get some kind of symptoms we’re not used to. Which you’ve referred to many. Is that a fair way to explain it?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : I think that, yea, absolutely. That’s nice. That’s a really nice snapshot that’s easily digestible. Yes. What’s interesting, just leaping off of that, is the idea of polycarbonate biphenyls, or PCBs. Talking about an unnatural compound. Something that the body doesn’t recognize. Often times, we store these compounds in our fat. We want to get them out, and PCBs, certain metals and so forth; the body is smart enough to say I don’t know what this does. I’m getting it out of here. The safest place to dump it is in the fat. You’ll see it accumulate there. The half-life, the time these toxins can stay around in the body, it moves into the decades and decades. Because, our body isn’t equipped. We didn’t evolve with these exposures. They are synthetic, as you said. They’re man made. We sequester them, and they stick around, which is a drag. Which is unfortunate. Which is why we would like to minimize our exposure.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : That’s great. I’d just be interested; have you tested yourself? Have you run these whole blood, for instance, screens on yourself? Or other people which are more normal and haven’t come into your practice at a chronic disease level? In comparison, how do they compare to the chronically ill? Are toxin levels lower, or how does it look in your profile versus someone else’s?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : That’s a great question. It depends on what we’re looking at. For instance, if you have a water soluble toxin that our body can get rid of. You might see periodic high levels in an individual. Say that you just purchased a carpet. That carpet is off gassing petroleum derivative molecules that your body can eliminate. You might measure some of those compounds and you’ll see a lot of them in your urine. Then, you step away from the carpet. Your body turns it over pretty quickly if you have good detoxification systems, and you will see them normalize. You can see that in a healthy individual. One of the signs of that, we all have these toxic burdens. In a healthy individual, they’re able to detox and remove and get on with their life. They might notice when they’re in the carpet off-gassing. When they’ve got a little bit of a runny nose. Or maybe a slight headache or a cough. Some of the signs. But then they get out, they deal, life goes on and they are no longer bothered. In the toxic person, yeah, you could absolutely see higher levels. In the person with the complex chronic condition. Part of this is that their body isn’t able to get rid of them so well. They just might have detoxing difficulties. Be it phase one, the first step in detox or phase two. For myriad of reasons, we can have challenge. Maybe we don’t have adequate nutrients to detox. Glutathione, I’m sure you’ve talked to your folks about it before, is really one of the major players in our ability to detox. We actually waste it. I shouldn’t say waste it. We don’t recycle glutathione when we use it to detox. In that complex chronic disease patient with a large accumulation of toxins, they may have spent the glutathione and they have not adequately replenished it yet. Glutathione comes from three different amino acids in the body. That’s how we are able to make it. But, if you’re chronically detoxing, or attempting to detox, you could run out of glutathione. One mole of glutathione detoxes one mole of toxin, be it mercury, or be it any number of different organic toxins. We also can have mutations in our ability to detox. We can have genetic mutations that might slow us down. Make us vulnerable to accumulation of certain toxins. We see that in complex chronic patients as well. In those cases, we make choose to look at those genetic mutations. When we find them, we really want to support those particular areas all the more aggressively. A lot of people have mutations in the glutathione s-transferase enzymes. The glutathione s-transferase enzymes are, as you can imagine, as the name implies. They’re major players in our ability to detox across the body. Not just in the liver, but in the skin,(and) in the kidneys, (and) in the gut, (and) in the brain. We can have mutation in these enzymes and therefore, when we see it in our patients. When we know they have a toxic burden. We need to get in there and really support it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: You’ve outlined many different ways in which our detox system may not be able to cope with the flood of toxins we are getting these days from many different synthetic sources. Carpets and heavy metals and so on. Is this something, I guess something I just want the audience to understand, is: Are issues with your detox system pretty rare? When we talk about mutations, sometimes, genetic mutations. It sounds like it could be something rare. One in a hundred, or one in a thousand? But my understanding is that a lot of these mutations today are relatively common. It’s a bit like the MTHFR, which is extremely common these days. There’s a lot of these mutations and just differences in our make-up which mean that maybe we’re not, we haven’t got a super powered detox system which is really working really, really efficiently in terms of chemical processes. It slows it down a bit, and then when you combine that with the fact that we have a lot of toxins around us today, it seems relatively common that they can crop up for some people. That this is hampering them in some way.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yea, yep you got it. You asked me about the incidents of mutations in our detox system. Are they common, you asked me? Yea, they sure are. We have somewhere in the order of four million single nucleotide polymorphisms. These mutations that you and I are taking about. These single base para switches, like MTHFR, is the most famous of those. We have somewhere in the order of four million. We have tons of them. Loads of them. Many of those aren’t significant. We have backup systems. There’s a lot of redundancy built into the body. We do have backup systems. So, a lot of those aren’t going to be particularly relevant to us and to disease process. But there are also many that are. So, yea, I would say that all of us, we have some mutations in our ability to detox. The question is, what hand of cards were we dealt? How big of a deal is that playing in our disease process? I do look at detox snips in a lot of my patients. It may not be the first thing I look at. It depends on what someone presents with. I do end up looking at them frequently. The glutathione s- transferase system. It’s huge. We have many of them. In different types and in different tissue locations. When you see one, it’s not the end of the world. Yes, we do want to support it, of course. But, it’s when you see multiple or when you see patterns. MTHFR is a big player in detox as well. Indirectly, but significantly. It’s going to help us make the glutathione that we need for the glutathione s-transferase. It’s a big, MTHFR is a fundamental player in methylation. We detox with methylation also. Everything is interconnected and a nice broad snapshot of what are the genetic issues, and how many and then go back to whether or not you think it’s playing a role in whatever the individual is presenting with. There’s a lot of angles we need to look at here, to guide us in our treatments. I want to step out for just a second. So, as not to overwhelm the listener. Really, the very first thing that we can do, Damien. The very first thing. You know, this, I know this and use this in my practice, is investigate what’s going on in current time, and we expose your sources. Any patient coming into my practice will have a meeting with my nutritionist on clean living, clean eating, clean living in the home and so forth. Lowering the toxic burden is huge.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Right. This sounds like your foundational work, that you said you did at first. What are the biggest things that you do there, that you feel are important to clear the way.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Far and away, the biggest thing we can do is clean up our diet and go as organic as much as possible. I would argue, I would say, that most urgently, we want to look at clean fat sources. Organic butters, organic milks, organic meats, etc. They really almost as important would be looking at organic vegetables and fruits and so forth. Going as organic as you possibly can, using the dirty dozen from the environmental working group as our baseline. At lease achieve the dirty dozen. If you can’t eat organic versions of those, like apples.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : This dirty dozen are the ones with the highest levels of pesticides and are there other chemicals involved in those dirty dozen? Is it primarily pesticides? And in many forms, in neurotoxins and different ones?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Primarily, we are looking at pesticides and their many forms. We could move into discussing, that’s what the environmental working group is testing anyway. They’re looking at pesticides. We could then talk about metals, we could talk about genetic modification, but that would bring us into tomorrow. We would be talking…

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Exactly.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : If we go organic, Damien. If we go organic as much as possible, we’re going to bypass all of these toxin issues. To the best of our ability. That’s the foundational. That’s the entry point.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : I guess, because some people are concerned about cost of organics, so I’m guessing that’s where you introduce the concept of the dirty dozen. Trying to focus on the biggest ones?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes. Exactly. Focus on the major players. Do not eat non-organic apples. If you can’t find good organic apples, then just skip apples. Secondarily, say you are in a location where you simply cannot find organics at all. I remember in medical school, having a debate with my roommate at the time. “Kara, there are no organics.” She lived in Hawaii. I find it hard to believe there are no organics in Hawaii. “There are no organics in Hawaii’. She argued with me. This was years ago. I don’t know that I buy it. But then, you talk about, ok, how do you clean the food? How do you clean it appropriately? You can do, you can use a vinegar solution. You can soak your fruits and vegetables in there, and you can reduce the pesticide load that way. That’s not optimal, but it’s a whole lot better than not doing anything else. A 10% white vinegar solution that is the cheapest vinegar off the shelf at the grocery store. 10% in a basin of water, and soak the vegetables for three to five minutes. That’s going to reduce the water soluble pesticides. Now, I use the vinegar wash. Actually, I use it all the time for any fruit or vegetable that I’m washing. Because it’s easy. I just have a spray bottle at my sink. I actually just use 100% vinegar. It’s so cheap. I have a bottle of vinegar. I just twist on a sprayer and I spritz it on whatever I need to wash. Let it soak for a period of time. That would be the next best thing.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. Great. I’ve traveled in many countries, and I’ve kind of tried to practice eating clean. It can be pretty challenging to find organics in some countries. Especially third world countries. I’ve used a similar strategy as you’re outlining. Focusing on the ones that are cleaner. Avoiding the worst ones, and trying to clean. Thank you for that very practical tip. That’s very helpful for people. Once you’ve done this first…

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Let me just throw in one more tip here. I’m sure you were doing this when you were traveling. You can always bring some extra vitamin C. We were talking about how much we loved that at the beginning. You can bring some extra nutrients to just protect yourself.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Right. Absolutely. We can talk about that and the kind of treatments you use which are also helping from that level. Is this the one big pot of your foundational area? Or is there something else you advise your clients to do? Water, or something in the house, or anything like that?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yeah. So the other major things that, guidelines to clean living, yes. You absolutely want to filter your water appropriately. I think charcoal filtration is the absolute way to go. I don’t know what your position is on reverse osmosis, but we can get into big problems if you remove all the minerals from your water. So, reverse osmosis is the cleanest, there is no question about it. But all the minerals are gone. You can develop significant, ironically, dehydration from consuming lots of reverse osmosis if you don’t adequately replenish the minerals. For me, I use, and I recommend, charcoal filtration to my patients.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Have you got any specific brands? To make this a little bit practical in terms of recommendation. If someone wanted to go and get something to help them.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes. My favorite brand has been for years. The Multi-Pure filtration system. You can get that. I think its Multipure.com. It’s easy to get. It’s pretty pricey though. They have a bunch of different systems, so there’s different price points on it. The other one, it’s nice, and it has a much more palatable price point, is Usana. I think both of those are quality products.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. I’ve been using Berky. I don’t know if you’ve come across them before.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : I haven’t. I haven’t, but you can send me some information.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : I will. Just a different alternative I’ve seen. I’m not use how they compare to yours.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : You go through. You do a whole home assessment with the patient. Just minimize exposure sources in the home. Incidentally, actually, I have a blog. I have a couple blogs on lead. I have a blog at drkarafitzgerald.com, Dr. Kara Fitzgerald.com on lead exposure. It was a case of Parkinson’s disease. This woman was rehabbing a lead house. Lead paint was in this old house they were rehabbing. She ended up getting very, very early onset Parkinson’s disease, and concurrently gave birth to a child who was later diagnosed with Autism. I think both of those were significantly, significantly, significantly influenced by this lead exposure. There are some pretty nifty tools, if you are concerned about lead, with your patients. I often am, if I do a urine, or a blood test. There’s some pretty nifty kits that you can do home lead testing with. You can buy these on Amazon and you can get them at Home Depot or whatever those big hardware stores are in the UK.You can buy lead swab kits and just swab stuff. A lot of ceramics that come in from China and there about, can have lead in the ceramic. You swab this particular lead sticks that I use, and it will change color if lead is present. If you look on that blog, you’ll see. If you scroll down, you’ll see a patient sent in a photo of the positive finding on one of the plates that eats on every day. She’s always had high lead and we needed to do some sleuthing to identify it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Wow. Is this potentially a lot of ceramics? Everything comes from China these days, and having lived in China, I can definitely understand that lead might be in everything. Is lead particles around it, or is this actually they’ve used it in the material itself?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : They’ve used it in the material. So it’s in the ceramic, and it’s absolutely worth it then. It would be great for you to do this yourself Damien and see what you find.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Sounds like an amazing test.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : It’s handy and it’s cheap. There are more sophisticated and sensitive tests that some of us use clinically. But this is an easy, easy, cheap way to just get in there and start looking now. When we did it, when I first started using these at the laboratory. We swabbed all of our teacups and tea pots and plates that we had in the lab. We all had different plates in our offices that we from. Eve Brolley, the daughter of the former owners of Metamatrixs, had this beautiful tea pot she brought home from China. It was riddled with lead. It was absolutely riddled with lead. Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : You know, this is really important. Because, if we go back, you said one of the screens you do is the whole blood. The first screen you do is a whole blood test for heavy metals and metals. It would be interesting which metals they are and then you have to kind of go through this detective process. Where is this coming from? When you have high levels of lead or of arsenic and it doesn’t make sense sometimes. Where is this coming from? I don’t know what exposure it might be.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald]: Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : First of all, which metals are you screening for in that test.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : In my whole blood, and these are all routinely covered by insurance in this state, so it’s extremely easy for me to do. I look at mercury, lead, cadmium, and arsenic. In everybody. Another great example. A mother and a daughter came to me. Actually, daughter was complaining. Her chief complaint was anxiety. She was in her twenties and it was so disabling. Early twenties, she was unable to attend college. She had to withdraw from college because of this. Relatively recent onset of severely debilitating anxiety. In her history, she did mention. Actually, her mom was with her, and they both were putting massive amounts of effort into eating very healthy. They were buying organic, they were eating lots of fish. They were proud of themselves, and clearly they were doing a good job. One of the things that they had, on a routine basis. Multiple times per week, was sea bass. You and I know, sea bass is very high in mercury. When I got her blood mercury, her whole blood mercury, it was off the charts. That was the smoking gun in this girl’s anxiety. She was becoming mad as a hatter. She was in frank acute mercury toxicity from chronic ingestion of sea bass. Of mercury toxic sea bass. We removed the exposure source and we detox her and her symptoms abated. Considerably. She was able to return to school. She does need ongoing treatment and you need to pay attention to what’s going with her regard to detoxing. It was quite useful in that regard. Sometimes, I’m kind of topic jumping here a little bit Damien. You can reel me back in. Sometimes you’ll see, in fact frequently, we won’t see any evidence of toxins in the blood. That’s because the half-life. The amount of time these toxins actually spend in the blood, isn’t long at all. It’s hours, or a day or two. They’re so toxic. These metals are so toxic to us, that our body wants to clear them out. Wants to take them out of circulation as soon as possible. For lead, we store it in the bone. mercury is going in the fat, etc. So, you will get a lot of people who have no burden at all. For those individuals, we need to drill down a little more deep. When I suspect the metals are in, which I really do for most folks. At some point, after we’ve addressed the foundational, we’re going to do what we call a chelation challenge. We’re going to look at the urine level of toxic metals. I’ll give them a compound that will help draw the chemical, the metals, from the body and dump them into the urine. Then, I get an assessment of total body burden.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. So this is versus the whole blood. Which you were saying, it’s very much on going exposure. I guess, when you are doing that, it’s interesting because it’s the critical. What are you being exposed to every day is more likely to show up there. That’s why it makes a lot of sense if you do that first. Because it could be something that’s going on every single day and making it worse. Versus looking at this urine challenge test, which allows you to see what’s the history, how much have they gotten this burden? When you are doing this, we have spoken a little bit about the urine challenge test before. Which labs do you use? What kind of chelator are you using for provoking challenge?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : I think that Metamatrixs does a great job. In just being really familiar with their analytics, so this would be going through Genova. I think they do a great job. I also think Dr. Sata does a really good job. Those are the major, those are the two labs that I use for this.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. Just out of interest, can you compare the two, or basically how they are on different standards? So you have to stick with one. If you’ve got your history with different patients with Metamatrixs, it makes sense for you to stick with that, because then you’ve got this comparison.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes. Correct. That’s absolutely right. I mean, you can take a, generally speaking, if you see a high in Dr. Stata, you are going to see a high in any assay. You are going to see it in Metamatrixs, but you are right. There’s different units, there’s different methodology, so it’s wise to just continue with whatever lab you did your baseline assessment. It’s wise to continue your baseline assessments with that lab. Just keep the same test. For chelation, remember, going back to the foundation. We need to make sure that individual can detox. We need to make sure their nutrients are up to speed. That phase one and phase two is good. We need to absolutely make sure kidney function is ideal. That they are moving their bowels. They’re having at least one complete BM per day. Once we have all of that dialed in, then we go in and we do a chelation challenge. For most of my patients, I’m going to use an oral DMSA challenge. Generally speaking, the easiest way to go is 1000mg in two divided doses over eight hours. The half-life of DMSA. Some people will choose to do a 24 hour toxic metal measurement, but I think eight hours is plenty because the half-life of DMSA is just under that. The DMSA is going to be cleared out of the body quickly and that’s what you are trying to look at. You want to see what the DMSA, what metals it’s pulling out. So for that reason, you can do an eight hour measurement. You start the collection, take 500mg or there abouts of DMSA and then four hours into the collection, you take a 500mg or there abouts a second dose of DMSA. Then, you collect for another four hours. You take a portion. You mix the urine, take a portion of that specimen and send it into the lab. I think that’s a decent way to assess. Some of my individuals, who are too sensitive, for whom I think the DMSA is not going to be tolerated well, we can use antecedal cystine, glycine. There’s a number of natural compounds that we can use. There are data on antecedal cystine as an effective alpolic acid. Having chelative properties will help pull it out, so we can do that if I deem it necessary.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Alright. Thank you very much for bringing up the, you were talking about the importance of doing your nutrient stage first. It’s safety. Because if you are going to use a chelator and pull toxins out. Heavy metals, then, it can be a bit hard on the kidneys and the other detox organs.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Incidentally, if you start drawing it out, and they don’t have adequate nutrients. If their detox systems aren’t up and running, and they are very dependent on nutrients. Selenium, and zinc, and glutathione and metholdone, (and) many amino acids. If those aren’t there, ready to do their job, you will make the person sicker. Even basic kidney function has to be intact. Beyond that, they need to have their detox ability really up and running. The other thing is, Damien, this is so fundamental. It’s so fundamental, and that is one of the major roots of entry into the body is orally. We eat toxins. We’re eating these metals in our food or whatever. If you’re deficient in minerals, if you’re deficient in your essential minerals, those transport proteins. The ways that their minerals are taken in to the body. If there are no minerals, or low minerals present, those transport proteins will be high jacked by toxins. This data has been demonstrated. One of the easiest ways you can reduce your exposure source of metals is making sure you have adequate essential minerals in your body. It’s so foundational. Those transport proteins, this has been shown actually very strongly in iron deficient anemia. Padmium, manganese, which can be toxic in high amounts, mercury and so forth. They can, they hitch a ride into those transport proteins that would otherwise be used for iron or magnesium, and actually, they are relatively non-specific. A lot of the essential minerals move into the body using these transport proteins, and if you are deficient in your minerals, which most of us are. Eating a standard western diet, those metals get a ride in. The other huge piece of this, is that these same transport proteins are at the blood brain barrier. Not only are they entering into circulation through the gut, they’re going to have readier or easier access to the brain and the central nervous system. One of the most fundamental things is to make sure you have adequate nutrients and especially adequate essential minerals. Isn’t that, it’s profound.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Yea, it’s amazing. That’s part of your foundation, right.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Part of my very fundamental, foundation.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : And amazingly simple. Which nutrients do you focus on?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Well, I focus on all of them, but I’m looking at, as you mentioned earlier, selenium. Selenium can actually bind and render inert mercury. Bind it and pull it out of circulation. In the body. So, mercury is highly toxic and selenium can bind it and just allow us to eliminate it. It’s potent. So, if you’ve got a mercury burden, chances are, you’re burning through your selenium. Selenium is used elsewhere in the body as well. So, selenium is a big player. All of them are. Magnesium is a huge, huge player. Zinc is a huge player. I would say that those are the biggest three. You also want to, of course, make sure you have adequate calcium. Lead is stored in bone, it’s going to displace calcium and other nutrients. You want to have adequate calcium in your diet, or take some degree of supplement. Chromium can be useful. Secondarily, zanadium. But really, the major minerals, magnesium, selenium, zinc and so forth are what we want to have in abundant supply.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : How do you bring those levels up. I guess, because I’ve come across this before. The way I thought about it was that it’s kind of like, because you’ve deficiencies. You’ve got these molecules that have holes. Waiting to pick up something. So, you’re leaving all these holes in your body, basically, waiting to pick something which is a similar molecule. You have the toxic molecule come along. That’s what you were talking about, the bones and calcium and lead seems to basically have a similar molecule. It will just bind there because you’ve left the gap open by having that deficiency.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yea, yea, yea.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Yea. I think it’s really great how straight forward it is really.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : It’s elegant

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : It’s elegant the way it works.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : You just eat a great diet. Then supplement with extra minerals as see fit. I assess mineral status in my patients. I’ll look at red blood cell status of minerals. Along with my whole blood toxin. Incidentally, Damien, on most of my patients you’ll see generally speaking, higher amounts of toxins relative to their essential minerals. It’s all of the time I see this. The toxins are a little bit higher. Even if they’re not frankly elevated, they’re higher normal or something like that. Minerals are so often in all of us, low or very low normal. Very low. Low normal to very low. You always see this skewed ration. Almost all the time I see this. Unless somebody is really intentionally addressing it. This is the most fundamental thing that we turn around. We’ll get your essential minerals nice and robust and that alone will help drive down your toxins. Then, we’ll do all of the other things. Look for exposures and so forth.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: For the essential minerals, I don’t know if you use this or not. The thing I’ve used in the past is the Greens powders because they have a broad spectrum of nutrients. Other than just trying to eat a better diet with a greater variety of vegetables is really where you have to start with this. What are your main recommendations? The ways you try to get your patients up to speed with that?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Ok, since I’m testing, I’m going to see the degree of the deficiency. If it is high enough, I’m going to supplement them with individual nutrients. I very often use magnesium as a standalone nutrient. I very often use zinc as a standalone nutrient. Selenium, since we don’t need as much or maledium or some of the others, we can use in a complex mineral supplement. I think the Greens powder is great. Whatever company you’re using, obviously you know that they’re ensuring their quality. They’ve tested for metal quantities and so on and so forth. It’s a super clean product. It’s rich in metals, so that’s a nice thing. Baseline. While I’m first starting to work with an individual, and they are really depleted, I’m probably going to use individual supplements relatively high doses to get them up to good levels. Then, after that, we can do a complex mineral formula and obviously, we are working with their diet. For a period of time, we are using individual nutrients.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. Thus the importance of, even if someone’s not chronically ill, would you recommend they go to a practitioner such as yourself? If they feel this could be an issue for them. It is athletic performance or whatever it is, it’s still worthwhile going for this process with a practitioner to get it done right, right?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Oh, yea. I think so. Absolutely. It’s really a lot of fun. It is! It’s very interesting to look at your biochemistry.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : It’s a lot of fun when you get energy and performance back. You start thinking clearer. All these thing are really exciting.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Not only that, Damien, but think about disease prevention. Now, we’re moving into the world of ethnogenetics, which I’m sure you’ve talked to your people about. Not only are you preventing disease in yourself, but if you are going on to have children, you are preventing disease in them and their offspring. On, and on, and on. If you think about ethnogenetics. It’s amazing what wellness will do to us. Not only us as an individual but really globally shifting. The planet and the generations to come, it’s so incredible. I would say that it’s a continuum of wellness. Optimizing athletic performance is not that different from treating the complex chronic disease. You’re still seeing underlying nutrient deficiencies. You might be seeing in the athlete increased oxidative stress. In fact, that’s common because they’ve got tons of mitochondria that are incredibly active. You’re going to be seeing some of those same imbalances. I used to, when I was in medical school, I was a road racer. I did a lot of, in fact, I liked criterium. I was working really hard at building up tons of mitochondria in my legs, in my quads and stuff. I enjoyed doing that at the lab. We had a lot of physicians focusing on wellness in the lab. Looking at data of athletes is so interesting and cool. Working on optimizing mitochondrial status. Making sure their nutrients are extremely dialed in so that you can shave a second or a few seconds off their time. After your season, often time, athletes notoriously get sick. Most students, they finish their intense period of training and then all of their event schedule, they often get sick. How do you prevent that as well? That’s something that we could do. So, sure. I’m more than happy to work on wellness. I think it’s a lot of fun.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Yea. Great, great. Would you say that the patients who get chronically ill, stick with it and work on this afterwards? I’m just interested from the standpoint, once they’ve learned about these tools, basically they see the benefits themselves. Just in daily life and being proactive.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes. It’s like throwing the stone in the pond. There’s this remarkable ripple effect. Then their friends and their family say, “Oh, my gosh. Look at you. You look so much better. You have so much energy. Your skin is gorgeous. You’ve lost all this weight. What did you do?” They have this influence on those around them, just by being representatives of what wellness can be.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : I’d like to point out, you said the way wellness can be. I do feel that a lot of us are walking around and we feel like we’re normal today, but if we went through these kinds of processes, we’d feel this level of being well. Which we haven’t actually felt before. Certainly the way I’ve felt on my journey. I feel like I’m thinking clearer than I ever have. Things like this. I think it’s a real shame. That we don’t realize that we could be better and that we could feel better. Because we’ve accepted some kind of norm. Maybe because it’s been going on so long.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : That’s right. We all acclimatize to whatever is in front of us. There’s that analogy where the frog. If you put a frog in a pot of water, you can slowly turn the heat up until its dead. Until you boil it. It will never, it won’t hop out. We get used to the disease process. We get used to feeling lousy. Just like the frog in the water. That’s actually an analogy that I learned from a patient. Who, incidentally, just became so wildly healthy. It just really changed his experience. He was writing to me and he said it’s like the frog in the pot analogy. The other thing is, this whole idea that lean on that we’re aging. Oh, I’m forty I’m supposed to be tired. I’m forty-five now, my bones are supposed to ache. My skin is supposed to look all saggy and gray. There’s this whole notion that we’ve built into the culture. Into the medical system. Because, really, the larger conventional medical model hasn’t had, does not have still, good tools around wellness. Therefore, all of these various signs and symptoms that we’ve been talking about, that are the early disease processes that we can change. They’re always attributed to aging.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Yea. Which is a real shame.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : It’s a real shame.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : It’s a scape goat. We had Aubrey de Gray on the podcast previously and he talks about how a lot of these damaging processes, basically that are going on. It’s not aging.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : We’ve given the name to all of this stuff, aging. But it seems like we’re aging faster because of today’s environment and the things going on today. It’s a shame that we just said “Ah, its aging. It’s normal.” Instead of trying to seize the day. So I just wanted to go back to a couple of things that we missed on your intest. You said you were using different chelators in some patients. Right, because if they are sensitive to the DMSA, which I’m guessing is because maybe they’re more mineral deficiencies. Or their detox system is having a harder time. Does it matter which chelator you’re using, in terms of what shows up in the tests? Are they standardized for DMSA or like so? For instance would anecetalsistine, which you said is a bit softer. Would that only chelate some of the metals. You would get a footprint or a pattern just for some of the metals and not some of the others?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : DMSA, so there are these, what they call binding affinities. Binding affinities vary depending on the agent that you use. Binding affinities simply means how tightly does that chelating compound bind the metals you want to look at. You can look up tables of binding affinity and see what’s going to hang on to the metals you want to look at most avidly. With the highest affinity. DMSA is really great and very well known for its ability to bind mercury. Less so lead, and less so some of the other metals, but it will bind them. It just doesn’t have as high of a binding affinity. Acetylcysteine is actually a little bit less. Now, it’s not going to bind as tightly as DMSA. Because, DMSA has structurally, if you look at it. It’s got a lot of sites for the metals to bind on. A lot of these Sulphur groups that the metals will bind on. If you look at it structurally, you can see why it’s so good at pulling out metals. Acetylcysteine is different. Structurally, it’s got only a single cell per group, instead of I think four on DMSA. It’s still going to. Acetylcysteine is just used in our body. We evolved using acetylcysteine and glutathione which is made from acetylcysteine to bind many different types of metals. Acetylcysteine is good, it’s just not going to have the same kind of affinity. It’s not going to bind them as strongly as a chemical. Now, DMSA is great for mercury. EDTA is going to be better for lead. Depending on what you do clinically. There are different cocktails or compounds that you can use. I don’t use EDTA in my practice because I don’t do IV. Really, ideally, if you’re going to use EDTA, you need to deliver it IV, intravenously. In order to really have it work. People use oral EDTA sometimes, but the data around using oral EDTA isn’t as good. Whereas the data on DMSA is very strong. It’s been used forever.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : That’s good to know. I’m guessing the labs, because they ask you to write down which chelator kit you use, they standardize against the different chelators?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Well, no. Generally, it’s so challenging. The lab, because they’ll have lab ranges for if you used any kind of a chelating agent. Ranges based on chelating used versus no chelating used. Because when you try to get specific. Like, for DMSA or for a specific ranges for EDTA, then you have to control how the protocol is administered. So everybody needs to use the same amount of DMSA and so forth. There are some laboratories that focus exclusively on occupational exposure. Toxicity in the workplace or something like that. Some of those places will have a very tight protocol that you can follow. Followed by ranges based on that. But, it’s a whole different arena. When you just had a massive cadmium dump in a battery factory or something like that. But for most of us, working with the less than occupational exposures. We’re doing the best we can. That’s what we have. Chelated ranges versus non-chelated ranges.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : It sounds like its diagnostic enough for you to get your job done and identify the problems, right?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Right. So, we haven’t really talked about the other stuff. We talked a lot about the metals and the whole chemical side. Which we were taking about earlier where the pesticides. How do you approach the chemical side of detecting that? Does that come after the metals? If you’ve gone through the whole blood metals and before you thought there might be some metals you went for the urine, when would the chemicals? When would you start looking at them? Be suspicious that that might be an issue?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Yea. Well, again, I’m going to assume that all of my patients have a burden. We really do. It’s been demonstrated. You can go to CDC and you’ll see. The people inside the area, in the farthest reaches of the globe, have some sort of organo- toxins, sadly. So, we all have that, so I always come in with that. Go through the clean living and get the nutrients and do all of those foundational things, and then from there. If what they’re presenting to me with clinically and if their history is compelling, then we move into to looking specifically at the organo-toxins. Genova, Metamatrixs, really developed awesome panels and you can get them now through Genova. You can look at the volatile organic solvents. You can look at PCBs, you can look at coroneted pesticides. You can look at many different toxins, organ toxins and I think that can be incredibly useful.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. Are those broad spectrum panels or are would you have to decide where you’re going to focus?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : You can get a broad spectrum panel from them now, that has a good price point on it. I would go there. I would go there because unless somebody gives you a really clear exposure history. For instance, my patient with ALS, who grew up in an orange grove. Unless you can really nail down what likely they’ve been exposed to, given their exposure history. Starting with a broad pattern, a panel is the best way to go. That’s what I recommend and do.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : What percentage of your patients are you looking at these kinds of panels with?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Not as big as I do with the metals. I would say, maybe at this point, maybe 20% of my patients I’m looking at these. It’s not that it isn’t a very useful tool, because it really is. Especially when I’ve got neurodegenitive conditions presenting to me. Where toxins are really. Thinking about toxins with those folks. Like with that early onset Parkinson disease. For her, she had this very obvious lead history. But for people coming out of Florida, or they worked on a farm. Some of these odd neuro-conditions really scream the need to have these kind of evaluations done. It’s another point that I wanted to bring up. This folds into our earlier discussion. That is, sometimes, when you do these foundational interventions and you really get the body functioning. You’re removing the toxins from the get go. Sometimes the body does it. If the body’s detox ability is intact, even in complex chronic disease, you can turn it around. People get on with their lives, and naturally remove them. You don’t have to go toward the more aggressive evaluations and detox processes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : So, it’s kind of like you are getting at a lot of things just with your foundation work we were talking about earlier. When you were saying you test for 20% of the patients. I guess these are the tricky patients. Where you are still sorting through it and you’re like, well we haven’t got it yet so we are going to have to keep on looking for the sources. What are you seeing comes up with these panels? Is it very, very different depend on where they come from? Where they’ve lived, like you were talking about. The specific examples there. Or do we all have a bit of these things in ours and how do you treat it? Do you have to be very targeted? How do you get pesticides out of the body, if it’s not doing it itself?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : For me, exposure history, you are going to get a lot of information. It can give you an idea. Gosh, a patient of mine, who really had some of the worse allergies I’ve ever encountered. Remember, allergies are a potent clue that there’s a toxic burden present. Grew up, literally, with a super fund river flowing through his back yard. Phenomenally. There was so many different toxins in this river. There were tanneries, leather tanneries around. Just all sorts of stuff in Montana. We needed to do a wide sweep. Incidentally, he had massive amounts of triclosan in his urine. Actually, it was by far, the highest amount I’ve seen. Which came from, not this super fund site. We saw evidence of body burden of PCVs and other chemicals in him for sure. But the triclosan came from those hand sanitizers. I’m just thinking of it now. This guy is a physical therapist by training. He sanitizes his hand after every single solitary patient, and he was using it as a toothpaste. They throw triclosan in toothpaste. It’s horrible. He had off the charts levels just from using a hand sanitizer and toothpaste. Just as an inside folks. Look and see if you’ve got triclosan around. If you do, remove it. Not only is it, will it increase allergies. All sorts of new data are emerging around it with regard to it being an endocrine disrupter. So, messing with out hormones and so forth. We can get triclosan out pretty readily. Anyway, Damien, organ toxins. I would recommend a broad sweep investigation to identify it unless there is a clear cut direction in their history.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : How would you target these things and remove them. A lot of these things you’re talking about are fat soluble. Is that correct?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : Let me give you a really neat story. When we were, back at the lab when we started to put together our toxins panels, and we were really flooded in the research. So much data are coming out, every hour of every day, around diseases associated with toxin exposures. You can imagine, as we were developing these panels and we were in the research around them, we became really morose. Very, very, very, very depressed. What do you do? Everybody has PCVs and the half-life is decades and decades. What do we do? The research around detoxification is not yet as strong. It will become, because we have no choice but to face this. We got pretty depressed in the lab, just looking at these day in and day out and day in. Just really how up a creek we all were. How screwed we all were. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. So these PCVs that are in our bodies that we can’t move out. The fact of the matter is, in fact, we are able to move them somewhat. One of the interesting stories was one of the guys in our lab had developed this farm raised salmon on a bagel habit. Every morning for breakfast, he would have a salmon, lox on a bagel. Every single morning. Its farm raised. Taste delicious. Man is it loaded with PCVs. It really is. So, all of us were experimenting on these panels ourselves because we were developing the assays.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Tastes great. I used to love that too.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : He gave his specimen, and his PCVs were really off the chart. They were so elevated in him. Again, it’s depressing, knowing the half-life. Oh my God, he’s stuck with these. What we did with him, was just put him on a good standard detox protocol. A good detox powder, good greens drink, nice super potent high fidonutrient green drink. A handful of various minerals and some brassica. Lots of those good brassica veggies and so forth. Measured a follow-up, and we absolutely saw reduction in his PVC burden.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. How long afterwards was the follow-up?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : It was a month. One month. He was moving it. The other thing, this is also sweating, exercise. Mobilizing fat will liberate PCVs into circulation. That is, if you are losing weight rapidly, and you’re not somehow doing a concurrent detox with that, that will become a problem. That’s why some people can feel awful when they lose weight. It’s also an opportunity for us to detox. In the weight loss process, you want to have care to make sure you are able to detox and that you’re moving those toxins that you’re going liberate from fat into the blood, that you’re moving them out. There are ways that we can do this. There is a small bit, emerging pool of research that suggests that we can move these guys out. There’s a group out of the University of Kentucky here, who have shown in animal studies, primarily, that just this. Combating the effects of PCVs which are very oxidative with essential fatty acids and with different fidonutrients, plant based nutrients. Will reduce the toxicity of the compound. Not only can we help remove them from our bodies but we also, reduce the damage that they cause. Those two ways of approaching it, is effective and it’s powerful, and it puts us back into the driver’s seat. We don’t have to be victims of this inevitable toxic burden that we have.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. That’s a great point to finish with. We don’t want to think. It’s not a great story to say you can take all these toxins in your body and there’s nothing you can do about them. Thank you so much for giving us that point of hope. Actually, that just that our bodies are naturally able to do this, if we work on the foundations we were talking about earlier. Providing what the body needs. So I just wanted to give you one last, quick fire question that we give everyone. What data metrics do you track for your own body on a routine basis? Is there anything that you follow up with monthly or six monthly, or once a year? That you like to keep an eye on for yourself?

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : This is a whole other topic, and we’ll have to schedule me again. I love the nutrition physical exam. A really easy data metric. I should actually not laugh, but in the winter, I tend to get a little bit of eczema and I can track both how clean my diet is as well as how my nutrient status is. My essential fatty acids and in particular I find gamolenic acid to be well. Some of the physical changes that I can see in the winter, in myself, give me a nice picture of what I need to be doing differently. With regard to my own health, I like using, annually, this battery of testing that I do on my patients. You were talking to be about people coming to me for wellness. You absolutely can do it. I recommend it to my family as well as doing it myself. Let me look at all my nutrients, let me look at my toxins. Let me see how my mitochondria are functioning. Let me look at my amino acids, and so forth. You can cast this wide net, take a look at it, and correct it with dietary changes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp] : Great. Kara, thank you. I can see you are really enthusiastic about this, and it’s been a great conversation and thanks for bringing up so much new information and advice for the audience. Thank you very much for your time.

[Dr. Kara Fitzgerald] : You are welcome, Damien. My pleasure.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Thank you.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It’s a real pleasure to have you here. I’ve been following your work for a long time indeed. Can we start off with, is lead a toxin, and if it is, why, and how does it damage us?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Well the answer is, yes. If you look at the periodic table, lead is able to fool the body into thinking it is supplying good things, like zinc, and the net result is lead does not support the key metabolic steps that things like zinc do support.
With the end result that lead, even in extremely minute quantities, is absolutely a negative effect on our health, and we are all loaded with a minimum of one to two thousand times the level of lead in our bone, that was present just 700 year ago.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow. Have there been biopsies or things like studies that have quantified the amount of lead in tissues, or in bone?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: We have studies telling you every tissue, from the back of your eye to your toenails to your hair, there’s a part, everything has been tested, and the level is known. And it’s different from tissue to tissue, and of course it will be different in people who have impaired ability to push toxins out, or people who have increased exposure because of a life where they work with lead paint, or they’re a welder, or many other occupations that give people lead as part of their job.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, great. So you just described a mechanism for how lead is a toxin. You were describing how the body believes that lead is zinc, or one of the other metabolites, one of the other minerals that it uses in its functions and its cells. And when it does so, it’s putting it into enzymes, and different areas of the body, and those parts of our body stop functioning. Is that a correct way of looking at it?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: That’s a very clear and succinct way, yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Oh, great, great. Are there other ways in which it does that? So besides basically stopping at parts of our bodies from working which I think we can all understand that we don’t want parts of our body to stop working, or to start working in the wrong way does it create oxidative stress, or does it do anything else while it’s in the body?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: It has many mechanisms by which it is doing the poisoning of our ability to use oxygen. It increases free radical related damage. It’s a toxin on many levels.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, thank you very much. So, what are the typical health conditions that you have linked through your work, or you’ve seen in your experience, that particular lead toxicity tends to lead to?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Well, initially we always thought of it as it related to damaging nerve function, with neuropathy and numbness, tingling, impaired judgment, depression. But as time has gone on, we now can relate to its adverse effects on every tissue in our body, so that we know that it’s causing stress on the heart, stress on the kidney. And across the board, there is no tissue in your body that is exempt from the adverse effects of lead.
And it’s hard for people to understand that you, in your body, store lead primarily in bones. So therefore, if I do on you a blood test, a urine test, or a hair mineral test, and I come back and say, “Gee, it doesn’t look any worse than anybody else.” Because we all have some lead. You cannot find a human being that is free of lead.

But if I say you don’t look like you’re particularly lead poisoned, I am giving you very misleading advice. Because only Harvard has done these studies, because it takes a very special instrument to non-invasively, instead of doing calcium in your bones, which is bone density, instead to do lead density, using specialized equipment that I think we only have about six setters in the United States, who can do this test.

But, when they do it, they are able to confirm that what you see in the lead in the bone is not accurately reflected in urine, hair, or blood, with a net result that people are being erroneously mislead into thinking that lead toxicity is not one of the reasons for their chronic fatigue, their impaired judgment, their depression, their weakened heart. And across the board, it’s really sad that the average doctor still thinks that lead in the hair, or blood, or urine is enough of a test. And it’s not.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right. So there you’re referring to, in functional medicine we often use the urinary metals test. So what we’re looking at, the metals that are coming out your urine. And sometimes then we’ll do the post chelation test.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So using something like DMSA, or DMPS, and then taking urine sample to see that. So, do you see any purpose in that test? Do you think it’s relevant, in terms of just lead? If we’re talking about right now, is this something that you use with your patients? Is there any way that you approach quantifying? Is it with that test, or do you use something else?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: I was the co-developer of the laboratory called Mineral Lab, which we sold many years ago to Doctor’s Data, and I had offices in Europe and Asia and across America, from the east to the west coast. So, I loved tests, because without tests, the patient has no way of knowing what’s going on, nor does the doctor. My only problem is that there’s always a limitation into how accurate tests are.

So, a provoked urine test by chelation has served in a fantastic way to help millions of people, because a provoked specimen wakes you up to the mobilizable lead in the patient’s body. And that number will help motivate the patient and, when necessary, the patient’s employer, into doing the needed health care.

I’m looking now at a different dimension, since I will be 80 years of age very shortly. I’m looking more at the effect on longevity, and the subtle effects that are not readily appreciable unless you take the time to read the published data, which is published in journals like the Journal of the AMA, but that doesn’t mean anybody reads it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, right. So, in terms of, I mean we’re very interested in longevity on the Quantified Body, so I’d be interested in your own, I don’t know if you do this, if you do your own post chelation urine, is yours very low levels of lead, for example? Or do you still have some of that? And I understand that, obviously, you’re looking at body reserves as well, when you’re talking about in the bone, for instance, for your longevity.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: So, an answer to that, first of all on my own tests, because I was born sick. I just happened to have reviewed my medical records from many years ago from the Mayo Clinic, because I have spent many years being extremely ill. And so, in medical school, I, because I could not go up a flight of steps without going into early heart failure, in my earlier training in school I was forbidden from being in active sports because my heart was quite obviously not up to any and significant activity.

So my level of lead, mercury, and cadmium has been a life-time challenge, because I understand that it takes 15 years for bones to remodel. And therefore, I tell everybody that since you can do the data, before the industrialized age, which roughly starts 700 years ago, the level of lead widely published in skeletal remains is extremely low, until we start doing the mining and disturbing the earth’s crust. And that’s when we bring the lead into our food and air.

Now, in terms of what’s optimal treatment for a patient, if you look at the published data that shows that, right out of Harvard, that the level of lead in your bone accurately predicts when you’ll go blind with your cataracts. And that the higher the level of lead in your bone leads to six times increased heart attack rate.

So, the problem is, we can’t suddenly have a large number of these expensive instruments available, and it wouldn’t change things very much, because there aren’t any people that aren’t born with lead, mercury, etc. because it’s widely documented that your body, as a baby, is rapidly growing, and, in a sense, serves as a waste basket for the mother’s body. So it’s now widely known.

If you look at the 10 American Study, where they took 10 Americans at random and looked at DDT, and PCB, and dioxane, polybrominated diphenyl ethers. When you look at published data, in general you can be certain that whatever level you found of a heavy metal in the mother will be at least twice that in the child. And so therefore, it becomes interesting to know what was the mother’s occupation?

And when we realize how much lead paint we were using at one point, the causes of where we get all these heavy metals are sometimes obscure. And in addition to that you have quite different capabilities on a genetic level for some people to clear the heavy metals they may be born with, or work with, much more effectively. Their diet, of course, has tremendous influence.

I, as a researcher in the field of heavy metals, I’ve uncovered many amazing stories with patients whose life has been virtually wasted because nobody ever thought to look for heavy metals.

And I can take an example of a young girl, about 15 years of age that happened to be in a study that I was doing on behalf of the University in Canada. They wanted to determine to what extent Shell Oil was poisoning people downwind when they were taking the sour gas and turning it into sweet gas with tremendous levels of the toxic metals being released into the air.

As a result of our laboratory being given the contract to do that study, this young lady had a cadmium level in her hair that was off the scale. She was not my patient, but it became my ethical obligation to chase her down. She turned out to be in McGill, and they were about ready to treat her for some rare form of malignancy that they couldn’t identify, and they were sure they were going to start chemo. And I told them if they start chemo she would be dead instantly, and that her death would be on their head. And so they backed off.
And I was able to, in her case, find the buried nickel-cadmium batteries that some bad people had deposited near the water intake to the facility that she was living in. And I have stories, like a whole household of people poisoned with mercury because the grandmother was storing mercury in an open container in the kitchen where all the kitchen towels were.

But the stories go on, and on.

We find what you look for, and since my interest at age 80 is how long should we be physically still active and healthy, and I really like the idea that that should be 100 years. And I would therefore like to help people understand that since you cannot suck all the lead out of your bone, the bone is going to take 15 years to remodel.

And so during that 15 years as your bones are remodeling, should you be lucky enough to meet a doctor who tells you that oral chelation works extremely well. I have published the book, and it’s in all the bookstores, Detox with Oral Chelation. And yet, doctors hardly tell people about it.

Just a high dose of vitamin C alone is a chelator. And if you’re taking 4, 8, or 10, or 12 grams, Linus Pauling was my close friend, so I liked 12 to 16 grams. But whatever you’re taking, if you’re urinating C out in good quantities in your urine, which is a 20 cent test on a piece of paper called VitaChek, if you’re urinating a lot of C out, that C will be chelating heavy metals and other toxins with it. So my obligation, if I’m going to help mankind enjoy a higher level of health when we get older, is to make us aware that this is a ubiquitous problem.

And obviously in some people it is the main problem. The man comes to me, he’s been welding for 30, 40 years, and his lead levels are off the scale. Those are pretty open and shut, but it’s really amazing how in one case I uncovered a smelting function in Sacramento.

They had about 30 or 40 employees, many had been in the hospital repeatedly, many times, at Kaiser and other hospitals in Sacramento. And they would be sick for two, three weeks. They’d be treated and sent home. No one ever made the diagnosis.
And when I did, by coincidence, my nurse, her husband was one of those employees and I said, well bring his hair in. And then I got it, and it was off the scale. I did a few other people, but what was interesting is that Barney Kolata, who was the guy doing the most work with the molten lead, was Japanese, and he never gave up his early Japanese diet. And he had one of the lowest levels of lead out of the entire employees. Whereas one of the secretaries working at the computer in the distant office living on sugar and Sweet’N Lows and coffee had one of the highest levels.

So it’s really interesting the influence of diet and genetics on how well you handle these heavy metals. But it’s an important part of, I think, of anti-aging, or any kind of medicine, to make people aware that yes, it may be the main problem that you’ve come to me with.

And when we look at the amount of mercury in many people’s mouths, when you just open their mouth, it’s pretty clear that they have a toxic time bomb in their mouth. And yet at the same time, some people handle it better than other people. But across the board, no one is escaping without a negative effect on their body.

But we have to settle for the fact that all tests have their limitations, and it makes it easy because people have to spend their own money doing this detoxification. And therefore, they’re entitled to have the best data we can give them. How full was your tank when you came to me, and how effective was I at getting your tank empty of lead, or mercury, or something.

And what’s so sad about all of that is that, very simply put, we can show you that if I take that welder, and I have him get 100 chelations, and at the end of 100 IV chelations he’s excreting almost no lead. What is amazing is, I knew that I didn’t want to put him back to welding, and so he was with a big company so we put him in an air-conditioned office to do paper-shuffling.

But at the end of six months, I brought him back and did another provoked chelation test. And this time after receiving over 100 chelations and telling me how fantastically good he felt, he was a brand new man. But at the end of six months with that provoked specimen, it was 90% as bad as it was before I gave him 100 chelations.

And this is what’s so sad. I am having trouble getting people to understand that just because you’ve chelated somebody, and they feel fantastic and the lead levels being treated are low, you have not solved the problem.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So, this is because, as I understand it, as the bones remodel, the lead is coming out into the blood again, and then you see the visible levels and it comes out of the urine as it’s getting chelated again. So, as you were saying, it takes 15 years for that to happen so, basically as I understand it, you’re saying that we have to be chelating every day or like with IV once a week, or whatever the regime is constantly because it’s going to constantly be refilling your blood stream as time goes on.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Exactly. And the thing that we have to make clear is that I took the time to put 507 published references from doctors in industrial medicine, who work with lead workers, who had actually published the data that all EDTA will bring lead levels down, even if you’re working with lead daily, to safe levels for most workers. Again, my website, 507 published papers.

Oral works, and yet 99% of doctors tell patients that it will not work. And it’s misleading. If you tell people there’s something they can do orally, and if technically vitamin C and EDTA are almost the same price range.

So why make a big deal out of it if EDTA was shown by Johan Bjorksten, back in Madison, Wisconsin, where I am born and raised and he’s a world expert on cross-linkages. He showed that multicultural organisms, called rotifers, dipped in EDTA every day lived a minimum of 50% longer than any rotifers not so treated.

So the message is loud and clear. In my mind, no one today is achieving the health span they might have achieved because we are ignoring this obvious problem.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So, for listeners at home, what is EDTA, and what does it do?
[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid. I kind of make a joke out of it, because acetic acid is another way of saying vinegar, so I tell people I’m you’re handy dandy grocer. But the facts are that EDTA has been used by companies like Chick-fil-A to keep the coleslaw fresh. It’s part of our diet; they buy it by the railroad carload.
And so people are hearing that it’s a synthetic molecule. You could call it a synthetic man-made amino acid. Some people are going to run away from it, and that’s their prerogative. We can do good chelation with garlic, and vitamin C, and there are many natural chelators out there.

It’s only that EDTA happens to have a really high affinity and is so specific in lead it is not that specific with mercury but at the same time, it has these documented studies, because I have pulled every published paper that involved EDTA with a professional researcher for over 20 years, and I pulled over 7,000 papers. So I know a great deal about EDTA, and I really wish that we could have people look at is as being not any different than taking vitamin C.

Ascorbic acid, acetic acid, the point is that EDTA is doing things that can help forgive what we have done to our planet when, out of necessity, we started mining. And when we started mining, we put things in the air, and it winds up in our bodies. And it is not allowing us to live to, what I think, is my intended useful lifespan, which is why, for over 30 years I haven’t gone a day without oral chelation.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow. So, when you’re talking about EDTA, is this something you’re taking like twice a day? What kind of dose of EDTA are you taking daily, and can you explain what it’s actually doing? Is it binding specifically to lead, or is it binding to other things? And is there any safety concerns in terms of it binding to other things, say minerals that we do need?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Thank you for a great question. Because I took on this obligation, I have researched that EDTA is a non-specific chelator. It’s not going to deal with just lead. When it is bored and there’s not much lead around to work with, it will grab mercury too.

And across the board, when we look at what it is doing in the body, it seems to be a wonderful anti-oxidant. So it seems to prevent cross-linkages that may be free radical related. And on children, babies particularly, I love putting EDTA into the bathtub.

We’ve had some people like to put it in rectal suppositories, which I have nothing against other than I want that to be done on a factual basis. I see nothing to support that it’s better absorbed at the rectum than it is at the mouth. And if you’re going to be doing it every day for 15 years, I think it gets tiresome to put it in the rectum every day.

But bottom line, we can use zeolite as a chelator. We use vitamin C. There are many things that we use. But EDTA, because there’s so many published papers about it, and it’s what we wound up using in the study, which was called the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy, where we did spend 31 million dollars of NIH funds.

And it’s really important to understand that most people who read NJAMA, the TACT trial, the Trial to Assess Chelation was supposed to put all the chelation doctors out of business for once and for all. And it was a pretty shocking thing when it came back that it was in fact safe, and effective. But, they have done everything they can to keep how safe it was from the general public.

And we have now taken the time to get the raw data, and find that in fact there’s a 51% reduction in death, in diabetics. And the data is so persuasive that we have had another visit. Gervasio Lamas, the head of the Miami Heart Institute, is taking on the burden of raising another 30 or 40 million to do another study, because the data is that substantial that even the FDA says if you do one more study, we will approve this as a treatment for diabetics.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow. This study was specifically done on EDTA, or is it on other chelators?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: That was, and let’s make it very clear. The Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy was based on the protocol that I wrote. It was I, Garry Gordon that took it on myself to write the protocol that over 10 million people have followed safely without a single reported fatality ever, using my protocol.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: And, besides the diabetes benefit you just remarked, were there other benefits that were discovered?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Every possible benefit from lowering hypertension to getting feet warmer, to stopping intermittent claudication to improving blood flow to the brain, memory. I mean, anything that’s tied to blood flow, because think of it, the cheapest test you might do would be a calicium measurement of the patient’s coronary arteries.

And if we can just realize that age 60 we have 140 times more calcium in our vascular tissues than we did at age 20. And so we gradually turn to stone, so there’s good reason to tie the entire aging process. In fact, I tell people that as an anti-aging doctor, I focus first on a simple motto. I want you to have strong bones and soft arteries when you’re 80.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That makes a lot of sense. And you certainly sound very energetic. You say you’re 80 years old right now. Are you 80 years old?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Not until January 3rd. I have another two weeks reprieve there.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, that’s pretty much the same thing. I would just like to ask you, personally, how do you feel these days, how active are you? You mentioned that at one time it was difficult to walk up stairs. How does that compare to the situation today?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Well, I just yesterday was jogging on the golf course with my two dogs at 5:30 at night, trying to find out how can I tell the rest of the world how great it is at age 80 to be healthier than I have been in my entire life. And so just coincidentally I was looking for some papers today, and there it was, my old medical files. And there fell out because I’ve had so much heart problems, so much bone, I have had advanced osteopenia. The list of problems I had is so long, that I got bored reading my medical history.
But, the point is, that I was a basket case, and it was interesting that I would up seeing all these doctors at Mayo Clinic. Which, it’s always good to see the best mainstream doctors you can, because although they didn’t help me one iota, it at least documents where you were. And it’s really interesting because I really wound up seeing them because of a minor accident. Riding my horse I got bucked off, got a fracture of the ankle. Turns out, I had osteopenia.

And I have very advanced, an underdeveloped testicle, and other problems. I have a lot of health issues. But it was amazing that age 80, I feel today better than I have in my lifetime. I just want to share with others that it’s more important in my mind because I still drive the same car after 10 or 11 years I’d rather drive the same car and spend whatever I save on my body.

Because it’s not free to take care of yourself. I spend a lot of money taking care of me. And a lot of people would rather think that it’s nonsense. And so all that’s going to change as the tests for how old we are become much more widely available and increasing sensitive. We’ve been dealing with rather insensitive monitors to tell you exactly how old you are.
But I can motivate people today to take care of themselves because many people are either worried about losing their memory, or dying of a heart attack, or dying of cancer. So it’s not that hard to go online and do some pretty good memory tests today.

It’s very easy today to do calcium scoring and other tests of your heart to know what’s going on. And in terms of cancer, I’ve been lucky enough to find a Caprofile.net that has been, fortunately, finding cancer three or four years before the lump or bumps, so I can motivate people to keep their tests in really a good safe range.

But the ideal test is going to come very soon. Because we are getting into the day and age that the price of tests continues to drop, and the number of potential tests you do on people continues to expand, and pretty well. I’m confident within two years we’ll have tests that will tell you, within a month of introducing a new modality into your diet change and exercise.

I’m now having fun teaching people about exercising while breathing oxygen. I mean, there’s many different things we can do. We now have people drinking a water product that has in it all, what we call, redox signaling molecules. That includes molecules like ozone, hydrogen peroxide, etc. And so, an amazing thing is going on with me.

I am today sitting remarkably sad that we all bought into the wrong theory and we thought anti-oxidants was the best way to help people. And now it turns out that I’m devoting much of my daily effort to teaching people the power of oxidative therapies.

And ozone, of course, is kind of expensive at the high end, but drinking ASEA water and taking things like silver that is catalyst to oxidation, and breathing oxygen while exercising would all obviously be oxidative. And if I happen to add some time in the far infrared sauna, you begin to get the feeling that I’m really teaching people today that although anti-oxidants have their definite place, we must have balance in what we teach.

So I’m really on a vendetta to change the over-emphasis today that everybody thinks the whole answer is anti-oxidants, because without oxidation you will not get the signal for your intracellular switch to turn on the production of glutathione. Let’s make that simple.
ASEA water is available, proven safe the FDA says it’s totally non-toxic yet it increases intracellular glutathione production by 500%. Which is a cheap way of my helping people have something, because glutathione is another nice way to help deal with the heavy metals and other challenges that our body’s doing.

And it’s so documented that the Olympic Committee had to meet to decide that it’s not illegal doping, because this water so enhances oxygen utilization that athletes are beating their own record. But it’s all, totally legal.

It’s nothing but salt water that’s gone through a process so that what we call redox signaling molecules like ozone, which most people aren’t very familiar with. But they’re going to have to become familiar with, because it’s only with things like silver, and ozone, and using high dose C that I can deal with Ebola, and hepatitis C, and other threats that people are beginning to recognize.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow. Could you, that reference was Sea-o water?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: A-S-E-A. It’s really astonishing. I thought that this was nonsense, and I was a hard one to convert over, but when I finally met Garry Samuelson, who’s a medical nuclear physicist from BYU, and understood what he did with the salt water. Because I’ve been with Robert Rowen, he and I brought International Oxidative Medicine Association to the world.

After I formed ACAM some 40 years ago the American College for Advancement in Medicine to teach chelation. Now I’m teaching oxidative medicine, but we have this problem that people don’t know anything about ozone.

Yet, if you take anybody that’s got hep C or terminal cancer we’re getting dramatic results on these patients because we help the body overcome challenges by having available safe redox signaling molecules, like ozone, that cause the body to turn on amazing switches, so all of the sudden you’re making 500% more intracellular glutathione.

So, glutathione is [something] everybody appreciates. We’ve seen Dr. David Perlmutter if you go on the internet he has an advanced patient with Parkinson’s who’s been with a walker for six, seven years. He cannot say anything understandable and he can’t walk. He puts the glutathione in the patient’s vein, 10 minutes later he walks perfectly up and down without the walker, and he speaks perfectly clear. So glutathione is a pretty good thing.

So I’m just teaching people that we have it all wrong. That only when the body sees a safe signal, like a controlled stable ozone, or a stable peroxide, is the body able to say, oh, I think I better turn on my own intracellular production of things like SOD, catalase, and glutathione. So it’s pretty exciting.

With the field of medicine, I’m quite confident that we will be doing a lot of [in] my life adding things like pulse electromagnetic field, and the use of far infrared saunas. And the whole idea of breathing in oxygen while you’re exercising. I mean, I am having so much fun.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I can hear that, I was just about to say it sounds like you’re having a lot of fun with all these new therapies.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: If you told me 10 years ago that when I reached 80 I was going to be in the peak of my health, I would have said that you must really have been nuts.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So, you mentioned so many different things, I want to clarify a few things. First of all, you mentioned infrared sauna. And this is one modality people use to detoxify by sweating the toxins out through their skin. Is this the reason you’re using it for? Are you using it for a specific toxins? Why are you using infrared specifically?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: The answer to that is that your skin is a great, huge organ. Perhaps the largest organ, unless you want to argue the endothelium is slightly larger. The skin is the major way your body handles certain toxins.

We have documented that we’ve had people that were disabled by chemical exposures, to the point that their brain had been fried; they didn’t know their family’s name. They were on total lifetime disability. We brought them back totally, taking sometimes 8 to 10 hours a day for one, two, or three months of sweating in a far infrared sauna with them coming in and going out and using certain nutritional things.

I can do it far faster today when I had the rest of my knowledge about oxidative medicine. But the principle is there. The Attorney General state of Utah had so many officers that were poisoned when they raided angel dust operations and lost their memory were on permanent disability. So that he’s so happy because he doesn’t have to pay disability the rest of their lifetime because they’re back to full functioning.

But in one case, it took 90 days of supervised far infrared sauna and a total treatment program. I, of course, with a homeopathic background and nutritional background, with a pulse electromagnetic field and the other things I’m telling you about, could get that same result in certainly less than 30 days.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, okay. So, will infrared sauna chelate, or, it’s not chelation, but detoxify across the board of toxins, or is it specific?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Yes. The guy who really wrote the book about it is the founder of the Church of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. And so some people call it the Hubbard Tank therapy. And we used it after the 9/11 disaster. And we were able to get some of those workers that had not protected themselves, that were so filled with chemicals they were facing death.

We have a lot of experience with this, but I reluctantly give the knowledge to him. But since he was the founder of a sudo-religion, there’s a lot of people who have not thought to improve his initial protocol. But it was involving constant use of some niacins so your skin as always getting a lot of extra circulation, so you had more blood getting to the skin and other nutrient ideas.

And there’s a lot of refinements in this whole concept available today. I have 4,300 doctors I talk to daily in my forum on anti-aging and chelation therapy. And I’ve spelled out a lot more detail in that, which is free of charge to any health professional, and we’re in 68 countries.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, and I certainly want to put links to a lot of the things you’ve mentioned. Like, the chelation study you mentioned, your protocol, this email list, would be interesting to many people.

Now just to go through some of the other things you mentioned. I think going back, first of all, to the lead, and you mentioned that there’s only one way to establish if you have a high level of lead in your bones. Is that through some x-ray mechanism? I’m guessing this is only used in studies, and it’s not really available for the general population or patients.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: That’s the unfortunate fact, it’s only available at research level, but, the papers are so solid. You just go to any computer and you put in bone, lead, and health. John Hopkins also has one of these devices.

And so there’s nothing to argue about. It is so clearly well established, and there is the simple fact. You have to understand that National Geographic first did the first issue on Chemicals Within Us. They said open and shut, the way the mother gets rid of lead is just have more babies. Because that’s where the lead is leaving her body and going into the babies.

And so, when we realized that the babies they’re talking about, when you go to Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Philip Landrigan, he’s the head of the department of pediatrics, he runs the research laboratory for measuring all the toxins in your blood. They charge, when you send him 20 tubes of blood, $4,900.

But he says, why keep sending me blood? No one has ever been able to pass the test. The human population is loaded with polybrominated diphenyl ether. That’s the flame retardant that HBO pointed out in this past year, was complete fraud. It actually makes the house burn faster, it does not protect.

But we’ve sprayed it on every mattress, on every pajama, and on every airplane seat cover. So every human is filled with PBDE. And there is an interesting correlate. Since we’ve been doing the PBDE, I got out of medical school only some 56 years ago, and at that time the average sperm count was 140 million. Today the average sperm count is around if you’re lucky 40 million.

We’ve lost 100 million sperm because everyone is walking around loaded with toxins. That’s one of the reasons we have so many fathers now have twins, because they can’t have babies the old fashioned way, they have to have a fertility specialist.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So, for the people listening at home, this is going to sound really frightening, all of this, if they haven’t come across the area of toxins before. So, in what ways could they quantify any of these?

What would you suggest for someone who’s maybe concerned with a few symptoms, maybe not serious symptoms, but a few symptoms here and there perhaps you could outline symptoms that should be more of concern? They should think more about these types of things? Lead and these other toxins. Or, the types of tests.

Would you recommend they go, for example, for the urine, the post urine chelation test to establish these kind of markers? Or how would you suggest that they kind of gather some evidence to convince themselves that this is something that they should be working on continuously, as you recommend. So like a daily chelation, or an approach to detoxifying.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: I think the answer is this: everybody, if they get a really careful health history given to them we’re going to have more and more of these questionnaires available online. When people are honest and admit how many days they have trouble getting running, how often this isn’t working, their memory isn’t up, they have abnormal appetites.

If we look at everything from depression to fingers that have lost feeling, the list is very long, and the cheapest test, of course, was the mineral test on your hair. Because hair didn’t require a doctor, it could be sent to a laboratory. But some laboratories got in that weren’t really up to our speed. So I’m a proponent that they use a laboratory that other doctors use.

Doctor’s Data is the one that purchased Mineral Lab. When I had Mineral Lab we had offices, as I said, in Asia and Europe. So this has been my life’s passion. But any test.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So at the lowest cost end, you would recommend the hair metals test from Doctor’s Data?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: The hair test. And here’s the rest of the story. If the hair test shows no mercury, no cadmium, no lead, then that means, essentially, that you cannot get rid of them. Because you can’t be living in this planet without being loaded with these metals. So if there’s none in your hair at all, then it means that you have a block in your ability to get rid of them.

And that is really very common in autistic children. It’s so sad, because we have tremendous success in dealing with autistic children, but if the poor doctor doesn’t know that the hair test will not reveal the lead and mercury if there’s a blockage in the body’s ability to excrete heavy metals because hair is nothing other than excretion, just like urine is an excretion. And so if they don’t see it, then they think that they said, Oh, well it must be something else in the way you feed your child.

It’s got to be something else, because always, you cannot escape the heavy metals. And I repeat, if you’re the director of the most advanced toxicology lab available to doctors, at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Philip Landrigan, his question is, why would you keep sending me anybody’s blood specimen, because it’s not paid for by your insurance, it’s going to cost you $4,900 for us to do it.

And there’s never been anybody he’s ever tested that doesn’t come out with at least 160 chemicals that will induce cancer, or neurotoxin, or endocrine disruption when he measures them. And there is no safe levels, because when you have a little of the polybrominated diphenyl ether and a little DDT, and a little dioxane, all of this is on top of having the lead.

So nobody should think, oh well it’s just a small level. A small level is on top of a small level of something else, on top of a small level of something else. So if the goal is to realize that in our complex society today, I think that it’s terribly important to keep you as sharp as a tack after 65, because I think many people, their first job may not be their ultimate career that they’re meant to be on Earth to do, and many of us don’t know enough until we’re 65 to be a tremendous service to our fellow men.

So I’m a real proponent of course, I have a vested interest in this, as I’m 80. I’m a proponent of life extension.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s great. So one of the other topics you have spoken about during this is taking EDTA via oral chelation versus IV chelation. For many people, when, if they go to local doctors who are specialized in detoxification, often IV chelation is the method they’re probably first going to come across.

I think you recommend more strongly oral chelation with EDTA. Could you talk a little bit about that, and what your thinking is there?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Well, it is a little complicated. As the founder of this chelation movement, I came up with a name, the American Academy of Medical Preventics, and I wrote the first protocol. And I told every doctor, you can tell me how you’re doing it, but I’m going to take input in. So I wrote the first protocol.

And when I was doing that, I was just thinking today because I had a 16 year old young lady in a hospital in Sacramento out of control, facing death, with juvenile diabetes. And her family had seen the dramatic things that I was doing with IV chelation. And we took her out of the hospital for a few hours each day for me to do IV chelation. And we completely saved her life, and her diabetes went under control.

But we’re not allowed to talk about things like that, because there’s not enough research. Although I just told you that I didn’t know that, some 40 years ago, that that was going to be that effective. Now that we have a 31 million dollar study, we have a lot more knowledge.
So, the sad thing is this. We don’t know until we test the question. Will chelation stop, in this case, the person’s schizophrenia? Will chelation stop this person’s depression? Will chelation stop this person’s cancer?

Obviously, it’s not that simple, because everything that I teach is built around my FIGHT for your health program, where the FIGHT, F-I-G-H-T. F stands for food and positive focus, I stands for infection, G for genetics, H for heavy metals and hormones, and T for toxins. So, with my FIGHT program, the more of the modalities I add to my program, the greater the chance that I’m going to have somebody very happily restored to full health that they’ve never enjoyed.

So most people can’t deal with that multifactorial. They want to assume that if I get all the lead out, that’s all I need to know. But unfortunately they now report that well over 5% of us have some kind of a lesion in our pituitary that is making our endocrine picture more complex.

And so the more you study medicine, the more you’ll find that you can become a super specialist at any aspects of the FIGHT program. You can do like Dr. Servan did as an MD after his brain cancer. He came back shortly after they gave him the chemo, surgery, and radiation that didn’t do him any good. He decided to become knowledgeable about which foods will help cancer not come back. And he was able to make it stay away for 10 years.

So some people do all their thinking about food, but they never ever realize that Harvard publishes the paper that proves that 96% of people, with a simple blood test, actively have cytomegalovirus in your body right now. And all doctors say, gee we think inflammation is bad for you. But not one doctor out of 50 is aware that they, and their patients, are walking around with active CMV.

Why am I making a big deal? Well, because we don’t have a drug for it, the doctor chooses to ignore it. Whereas I live in the world of ozone, and silver, and high dose vitamin C, and other tricks for infection. So I can bring that infection down to a dull roar so that the inflammation is lowered, so that nobody is aging as rapidly in their disease.

So, the more you look, the more you find. And now that we have the ability to do with 23andMe you can do a genetic test for less than 200 dollars. And you can now find out that yes, our genetic pool has changed because some of these toxins have changed the way our body handles methylation. So now you can see the big word epigenetic, which means above genetic.
So, as you get into the medicine that I study, it is fascinating to realize how many doctors go through life and all they learn is hormones. They never learn the heavy metals. They’ve never tested for toxins.

If you told them PBDE is in every one of your patients at astronomical levels, they would ask you, what is PBDE? Polybrominated diphenyl ether is the flame retardant that is in every human being, every mammal, from the Antarctic to the Arctic, in frighteningly high levels.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So it really comes across that you see today health is a multifactorial battle. Basically a battle ground on many levels, where it’s us versus infections, heavy metals, toxins. And it’s through a protocol like yours, which tries to address each of those, which we’re going to be able to protect our health, improve it, resolve chronic conditions, and promote longevity. Is that a good summation?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: That’s an extremely good summation, yes. Bottom line, everything is multifactorial and if you just attack any one of my FIGHT issues, you’re going to help every patient. But that doesn’t mean you’ve done all you could do, because some of us need to go from the infection control on over to the hormone support.

We have an ability now to stop menopause in all women safely, with the pueraria mirifica plant that grows in Northern Thailand. We have 14 years of research. And a dear friend of my, Christiane Northrup who wrote the book Women’s Wisdom, Women’s Body, is coming out with a new book in February.

And I have been working diligently with the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and we actually have proof that you will not get broken bones if you take this herb. You will never see dementia in your patient if you give them this herb.

And the reason Dr. Christiane Northrup, who’s head of OBGYN at University of Vermont, the reason she’s so enthusiastic is because during her OBGYN she looks at the vaginal tissues on 74 and 80 year old women, and find they become 15 years younger in less than six months.

So we have so much exciting good things to do for people. That’s why I wanted to get the basics out of the way, and have everybody realize that we are in for some exciting times, where you’re going to live longer and be more productive than you ever dreamed possible. But its part of my job is to start with the basics. And today we’ve really focused more on the kindergarten and first grade level.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: We’re screwed, we have to get in somewhere. So, you’ve spoken a little bit about inflammation there. I’m wondering if there are any markers you look at? There’s the HS-CRP, that’s the reactive protein that people often look at. But do you look at that?

Because for some people like me, mine is very low but I know I in fact have every high inflammation in other areas. So I don’t know how you look at the whole inflammation area, and if you look at that as a kind of marker of general health, or how progress is being made.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: It is extremely useful. It is only one of many markers. My friend Dr Vishdani is an MDPHD in molecular medicine, and we have at least 10 other tests that often will show inflammation that’s not reveled with C-reactive. So C-reactive is never a waste of time, but if it comes back and it doesn’t look like a big problem, it may have missed a lot of other forms of inflammation that it’s not sensitive enough to reveal.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, okay. So the other thing you have promoted, you feel very strongly about, is oxidative therapies here. On a previous episode we talked to Christine Burdette of Dunwoody Labs I don’t know if you know her, or of her work.
[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Yes, I have heard, yes indeed.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, great. Well so she has a certain set of stress markers [51:21 – 51:59 inaudible due to theme song] markers across our body.

Is adding an oxidative therapy, like ozone therapy or some of the others you mentioned earlier, potentially going to push them over the edge? And so is there potentially a balance that has to be made between oxidative versus anti-oxidative?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Great question. Well the bottom line is this. If you learn fungal bacteria and viral infections are epidemic in men, and only with my oxidative therapies will you keep them at a dull roar because nobody’s immune system is working as effectively as it could or would if you got the lead out. So let’s look at the big picture.

Everybody needs an anti-oxidant and an oxidant, and one doesn’t preclude the other. We have stabilized our ability to offer a product we call one Zeolite Enhanced. And in that product I have a -450 ORP, which means it is a stronger reductant than any anti-oxidant you could buy, but it is stable. And I can give it to you five minutes after I give you the oxidant, which is ASEA water, which is a +850, because it too is stabilized.

So we’re going into an exciting time when you could look at those two things, as we used to say oil and water won’t mix. Now, that turns out, we’re in a sophisticated age that these are merely ammunition, these are energies that your body needs, and they’re fuels. And so my biggest sad thing is that most people are going to take a long time to really get enough oxidative therapies.

I felt so fantastic yesterday because I was using my pulse electromagnetic field, and I was using my silver, and I was drinking a lot of ASEA water, and I was breathing the oxygen while I was exercising on a bicycle. I was doing everything oxidative. And everybody else would sit there and say, well you’ve embellished, you’ve gone too far. No, that was the best day of my life.

So, we have to kind of move it over to say oxidation is good, because we all have been using anti-oxidants, because we get them from many sources.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, great. You mentioned ORP. What does that stand for?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: Oxidative Reduction Potential. And so the ORP meters that you can buy online for $110. The day will come that I hope to have it, we haven’t worked it out yet, but wouldn’t it be nice if one day I find that I can have a meter and everybody can measure their urine and find out, ooh, boy do I need an oxidant. I mean, I haven’t gotten there yet, but that’s where I’m hoping all this goes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right. So it’s about balance, it sounds like. And so there you were talking about taking two things one oxidative, one non-oxidative and getting that balance by combining Zeolite and the other one.

Then it also seems like you put a lot of emphasis on how you feel, and how people feel in general. Do you believe if someone feels good, or if they’re taking some kind of treatment, or they introduce something new into their life and they’re feeling better, do you think that’s always a good thing?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: I would say it’s just a pretty good guide, but I am, of course, in energy medicine, so I have used Voll, V-O-L-L, electroacupuncture diagnosis by Voll, and they have many companies that sell that kind of equipment. They have simplified it, they call it Zito, and they have different tests.

But bottom line, I have changed lives for 40 years because I knew how to read the energy in your kidney, and I could tell you instantly if the medicine you bought that you’re taking is going to kill you or not. When I first got into this, I didn’t believe that testing could work. I was very skeptical. But my friend was Harvard trained MD in San Francisco was helping my patient and brought the device.

So I finally went ahead and got the device. They brought a child to me that age 18 month was having at least three to four seizures per hour, and had been to UCLA, Stanford, and had been to UCSF. Seen every top pediatric neurologist; nobody could stop the seizures. I stopped the seizures 90% in the first visit.

How did I do that? I took a simple history. Having heard me today, I said to the mom, well you’ve seen all these super specialists, did anybody ask you where did you live when you were pregnant? And nobody ever asked her. She said I lived at home with my folks. I said well what do they do? They’re almond farmers.

I said go home and get the spray they use on the almonds. She bought the spray in, in just a small tiny container. I checked it energetically on the child’s nerve point. It immediately made the nerve point go crazy.

When I balanced it out by thinning it out to one to a million, which we do homeopathically, instantly, the brain was able to start. Just like you can take a person after they get stung by bee, you can give them a very weak bee sting and they find they aren’t sensitive. But I had a home run in the first visit.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow. That’s an incredible story. Well, Dr. Garry Gordon, thank you so much for all this information. It’s pretty overwhelming, I have to say. Because you’ve obviously had a long career, and you’ve added a lot of different practices over time.
I would love to hear a little bit about you, just in terms of how you manage. Since you are nearly 80 and have been doing this for a long time. Are there any biomarkers that you track on a routine basis to monitor health, or longevity, or performance?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: I have tried all of them, because I have tried to formulize the entire process of anti-aging. And so a good friend of mine wrote a book called Biological Aging Measurements 20 years ago, Ward Dean, and the game is going to change dramatically.

So I don’t want to burden your listeners because the costs of tests is dropping rapidly, and we’re getting better biomarkers. The ones we’ve been using have all been useful. But it’s going to change overnight. And so, I’m not going to go down so that they… It’s been a kind of expensive labor of love to do the tests we’ve been doing.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, right. And what do you think is going to change it? I mean, I know there’s new companies coming in with things like blood spot test. And is there anything specifically you see that’s going to change the future of testing, like are there specific companies coming to market? What do you see that’s going to change all of this so rapidly?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: One woman alone says she will be able to devise a machine that with one drop of blood will give you 1,000 tests. So, I’m pretty confident this lady is telling the truth. And then doctors won’t be able to look at 1,000 tests, but computers will weed through it, and help doctors see the pattern that is there.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, thank you very much for that. Just one last question or you. What would be your one biggest recommendation for listeners? If they were to do one thing to improve their health, longevity, and performance, what would it be?

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: I have to go along with James Watson. He was the co-discoverer of the double helix. And he’s telling people, exercise. And of course exercise is the poor man’s oxidative therapy.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah, I knew you were going to say that. That’s a great answer. Thank you very much. And, thank you so much for your time today.

[Dr. Garry Gordon]: My pleasure.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview. If you’re concerned about lead and other heavy metals, here’s my experience so far as an example. To make this a little bit more practical. You can download my latest heavy metal test from the show notes for today’s episode.

There are two reports. The first is that I did a six hour post-provocation urine test with Doctor’s Data in November of 2014. I used DMSA, dimercaptosuccinic acid, as the chelating provoker agent for that. Lead was one of the three metals to come up higher on my test.
My levels were at 4 micrograms per gram of creatine, with their reference range being to target less than two micrograms per gram of creatine. So, for the more visual of you guys, it’s in the yellow zone. There’s a red zone, a green zone. Do you kind of get the picture?
My other two metals in the yellow zone are arsenic and thallium. Now arsenic most likely came primarily from my high consumption of chicken and rice for many years while living in China and Asia in general.

The thallium, based on the studies I’ve read, it’s a bit more unusual. But it very likely came from food contamination I was exposed to while living in Chengdu, West China, where the pollution has been documented. So, specifically thallium problems have been documented there.

The second test I did was Quicksilver Scientific’s Mercury Speciation test, which requires whole blood, hair, and urine samples. We looked at that test in Episode 13 with Chris Shade, so you can go check that out, if you want more details on it. He’s the guy behind Quicksilver Scientific.

My mercury came back slightly elevated compared to the Quicksilver Average. So, I was between the 50% and 75 percentile. It also shows my natural excretion ability, so my body’s ability to detoxify from the mercury, was slightly depressed. It wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t really bad, but it was just slightly more depressed than usual, so it’s something I can work on.

The test did come back pretty much as I expected though, as I’ve been working on mercury for a while. And so I didn’t expect it to be super high. As you heard in Episode 13, I’ve been doing biological dentistry and other things to lower my mercury levels.

The Quicksilver test provides a lot more detail than the Doctor’s Data test. A couple of other things I learned about these tests along the road is I’ve run the Doctor’s Data urine toxic metal tests while living in different places around the world over the years, as far off as Thailand. So it’s a test that is easily accessible if you’re outside the US. Which can’t be said for all tests; you know, some tests are really complicated to get done if you’re not in the US or maybe Canada.

Due to the blood, Quicksilver is a little more tricky, but most of the time you can just fine a phlebotomy service, or a local lab, that will help you with that part of it. And then you just ship it off to the States.

If you plan to do your own tests, avoid obvious heavy metal contamination the week or so before it so you don’t bias your results. You don’t want to think that you have more metals than you actually do because you’ve just taken in some. So, cutting out things like rice and chicken, for that period, because these generally have some level of arsenic contamination. And then of course, for mercury fish, in particular big fish like tuna and swordfish, which have high mercury levels.

So what have I been doing to lower these heavy metals? Well I’ve been working off and on on detoxifying these for about, just over two years now, with different chelators. Currently I’m taking modified citrus pectin with alginate, in a product called PectaClear. So this is the main chelator.

The reason I’m taking this one is because it doesn’t interfere with other minerals as much as some of the other chelators. So, the idea is that it provokes less detoxification symptoms because it’s a more specific binder, or chelator, to the target heavy metals; in this case, lead, for example. So it avoids creating mineral deficiencies by binding to, say, calcium, zinc or copper.

A comment I want to make on this particular product, PectaClear, and modified citrus pectin in general is that there aren’t a lot of studies on it. And the studies that have been done are mostly from the owner of the PectaClear products. There’s a little bit of conflict there.

However, the functional medicine physician I’m working with recommended this to minimize my symptoms. So I’m trying it out as an experiment. I have gone through some symptoms, such as fatigue and headaches in the past, so I wanted to avoid those.

I’m also using some of Chris Shades products, which we discussed in Episode 13. So I am using Quicksilver Scientific’s IMD intestinal cleanse, which binds specifically to mercury, and the Clear Way Cofactors. They provide detoxification support, basically. To help your natural detoxification system. That also includes his glutathione and vitamin C and alpha Lipioc acid supports, discussed with him in the episode.

I’m looking at this as long and slow process, and not pushing it aggressively to avoid the side effect as much as possible. So, personally, from my experience, if I push it harder and take in larger doses, I get fatigue and headaches, generally. So, I want to avoid those because I like being productive during the day.

Previously, I’ve done runs of EDTA, which is the chelator Dr. Garry Gordon was talking about today in today’s interview. For which there’s a lot of past research support its use, right. So that’s got a lot of studies behind it, if you want to go with the more standard option.

On an on-going basis over the last few years, I’ve also been taking standard alpha lipoic acid. Not the liposomal form from Chris Shade. And selenium in the form of SE-methyl L-selenocysteine. Selenium binds quite well to mercury, so that’s the reason for that. Alpha lipoic acid is a chelator, and selenium has a protective effect, because it binds to the mercury. In fact, selenium is an ingredient of Quicksilver’s Clear Way Cofactors I just mentioned, in the form of selenomethionine.

The forms of selenium do make a difference, so you kind of have to watch out for those. Make sure you’re taking the right ones; some of them can be a bit toxic, especially if you’re taking the higher doses. And you don’t want to take in too high a dose. 200 micrograms per day is the standard.

I’ve also done a run of Prussian Blue recently, which specifically chelates thallium, which is my bit usual metal which I’m carrying there. And the drug name for that, because it’s FDA regulated, is Radiogardase. And it’s often used for radioactive cesium, and radioactive thallium also. Just so that’s why it has that name.

That’s where I’m at. At this point, I’ll probably get retested once every six months to confirm that the chelators I’m using are effective, and everything is going smoothly, and steadily detoxifying myself.

I’d love to hear about your efforts to lower your burden, if you’ve been working on it also. Whether it be mercury, lead, or any of the others, arsenic and so on. Especially if you’ve tracked your progress, or you have some test results already. Let me know on the show comments, or just hit me up an email. I reply to everything.

Detoxification’s going to be something we come back to quite often, because it’s one of the ways we can increase our performance by lowering our burden of these toxins. Some of the ones we haven’t looked at all are like some other metals, but also there’s a wide variety of chemicals and other types of toxins like that, like pesticides and so on, that can affect us. So we’ll be looking at those in some future interviews that I’ve already pre-recorded, and are coming up soon.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Thank you. I am very happy to be here Damien.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Excellent. So let’s dive straight into – you have made a really big name for yourself as a mercury kind of guy, and mercury as a toxin. So let’s just look at that straight away. Is mercury a toxin, and what kind of health impacts does mercury have on us? Why is it bad?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: That’s the funny thing. You know, is mercury a toxin? Like we haven’t known for 10,000 years that mercury is a serious toxin, yet for some reason the narrative from the dental associations continues it somehow. It’s not a toxin in your mouth. But it is most definitely a toxin and it has a lot of effects through the whole body and it is just a basic way that it does things. It is by binding to these things called sulphydro groups. They are special kinds of sulphur that really run your antioxidant system. They set the ground for the immune system working and they hold all of your good metals. So if you are using a zinc in an enzyme these sulphydro groups hold the zinc in place. But unfortunately the mercury has an affinity for those same sulphydro groups and it is actually on the order of one to ten billion times higher affinity for those groups than the zinc does. So it starts getting into all the enzymatic reactions and it is important that we are not thinking that these are digestive enzymes. Everybody thinks of enzymes, oh yeah, digestive enzymes.

Now, digestive enzymes make your stomach digest at infinitely higher rates than just the acid in your stomach would do, but enzymes in your cells make reactions happen that aren’t favorable to happen just in the milieu of the cell. So they are really responsible for the whole body really working the way that it does and mercury interferes in all that. At a systemic level it is interfering. At a circulatory level it is creating little inflammatory states in the circulatory system. It is creating porosity or leakiness in the circulatory system. It is creating porosity or leakiness in the brain. It is creating problems in the kidneys and that can go from adrenal fatigue to actual damage to your filtration mechanisms.

In the brain it has got a lot of problems that really set you up for failure. Very specifically it targets the glutamate receptors. So in your brain you have got GABA and glutamate being the dominance of your neurotransmitters. And GABA is sort of your zen neurotransmitter and it puts you into a parasympathetic or resting, digesting, repairing state. And glutamate puts you into a sympathetic system or a sympathetic tone to your autonomic nervous system where it is fight or flight. But it also does good things. It creates memory so you know to stay away from the tiger but it puts you in this stressed state. And when the mercury gets in there, there is a hyper stimulation of the glutamate receptors so you have an exaggeration of being in this sympathetic state. So you start to feel fight or flight all the time and that creates anxiety.

So anxiety is the dominant manifestation neurologically of that but then that leads to fatigue and depression as it burns out the system. So yes, mercury does a lot to your body.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, and I like the explanation you gave because we hear a lot about toxins today. And I don’t think anyone really knows what that means. We take something into our body and it hurts us somehow. But you know, you just described it in a pretty clear way, that it basically gets stuck to bits of our body and changes what it does into something that it shouldn’t be doing or it stops it from doing what it is supposed to be doing.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, and ideally what happens is a toxin gets in there, irritates some part of the system, and there is what is called an hormetic response. Hormesis is irritating the body and the body bounces back with its repair signal to get rid of that. So it will detoxify and then repair. But some of these toxins have an effect that is epigenetic or transgenerational where they will actually turn down your response system and this is one of the biggest things where we need to look at mercury as a – what should I call it? A community toxin. As something that it is doing to the whole gene pool. One of the things that we find in research done on animals is that if we expose an animal in utero to a lot of mercury it is born and it may not have acute mercury toxicity but what it does is create a diminishment of the glutathione system.

The glutathione system is one of the dominant ways that you detoxify and then repair. And so you are suddenly born not with acute mercury toxicity, but with a lifelong susceptibility to further toxic insults. And those toxic insults can be from mercury or other metals or all of the organic compounds, [persistic – 00:05:59] organic pollutants, chlorinated, halogenated hydrocarbons like flame retardants. All of a sudden you are a susceptible organism. And somehow we get away as say industry gets away with saying no, there is no problem with mercury because look, you don’t have acute mercury toxicity.

But it just made this generation of children more susceptible to the next rounds of things coming at them. And the way these toxins will add together and have some of them make you weaker towards other toxins is really what needs to be seen and you and I were talking before the interview about me trying to get people away from thinking just about acute toxicity towards systemic ability to hold back this flood of toxins and really how the body’s defense mechanisms get weaker under various scenarios which then given a moderate burden with a system with integrity, there is no issue. But with a system that has lost integrity due to a number of factors that person is now going to suffer what looks like acute toxicity at much lower levels. So we need to integrate these views of what toxicity and defense mean.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. You touched on so many different angles there. Let’s just nail the epigenetics quickly. So you are saying that it is not actually a transfer from say the mother to the child of mercury itself, but the actual bias or the methylation or acetylation has been biased when it is being transferred because it was already biased in the mother. So you couldn’t detect mercury in that child, for instance. That is what I am kind of getting at.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Exactly. You can right when they come out but it goes away very quickly. All these people – I mean, I started thinking about this when I came on to the scene and all these people come up to me and they are like, ‘I know I am mercury toxic.’ And they send in the test and there is nothing there. And then I went to interviewing them ahead of time. Well, do you have amalgams? No. Do you eat fish? No. It is from my mother. And so the scientist in me was kind of like yeah, yeah, it is all from your mother isn’t it? This is an emotional problem, I think. Until the data started coming out and they would take groups of rats and they would expose one group to mercury while the rat was pregnant with the pups, as they are called, and the other to no mercury.

And then they tracked these and just a little – they would stop the exposure right when they were born and after a couple of weeks the mercury is all gone. But the epigenome is still there. The genome is biased towards having a lower expression of the very thing that it needs. And this bias continued for some time. In fact, what is supposed to happen is that they are born and they are born with a weak defense system because they don’t want to reject the mother. And then it comes out and expresses itself over the couple of weeks after they are born. Because the detox and the immune system come up together. And they are reliant on each other. We never really understood that. We thought they were different things but if your glutathione system is low your whole immune system bias is towards TH2, which is why these sick people have no ability to respond to viruses, which is called TH1. But they are allergic to all their food, and that is called TH2.

So you have got this biased immune system that is predicated on the lowered glutathione system. So back to these animals that are born and their whole glutathione system fails to develop the way it is supposed to. There is no more mercury to point the finger at so we get away with saying, ‘See, it’s not mercury that is the problem but the system is now susceptible to every insult that comes its way.’ And it was because of the exposure at the mother’s level.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That is really interesting. Is this new research or is this ongoing?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Well it has sort of just been pouring out over the last couple of years and you have to be able to see it and connect it to all the stuff that you have seen clinically and tie all those points together. I mean, we are at a point where there is so much research out there but those researchers don’t know how to get it out to you. And they don’t know how to tie it together with a couple of other things. And frankly they are scared, completely scared to say that it actually has any human relevance at all because they are afraid they will lose their funding. Because somehow something happened where all the funding for this kind of toxicity research only goes to environmental data. It only goes to working on animals and looking in the environment. It is never pointed at the human world.

There is some sort of fear, probably at the industrial level of what the – but also at the public health level or public health officials. I think they are afraid of what the implication is with their allowance of mercury in the mouth and in the vaccines. And there is some fear there. And it is very justified and we need people to be able to tie this stuff together that won’t lose their funding and will be able to continue in their profession. So it is people like me, because I don’t get funding from anybody. That may kill me but I don’t think that will be happen.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That is not going to happen anytime soon. You have been around long enough. You have been doing this for around 20 years now?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: No, it just feels like that. I had been in graduate school in mercury research since 2000. So that is almost 15 years. But I started this company in 2006 and I really only started doing clinical work in this company in 2009.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. So a couple of things that I wanted to tie up that you were saying before. You talked about glutathione and how mercury affects glutathione. Then you were talking about the fact that we have a toxin like mercury in our system and if we have things in our system that protects us we can be okay with a relatively high level of mercury if our system is really good at dealing with it, right?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Exactly.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So what is that system? I mean, it is glutathione? Is it other things?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Beautiful – thank you so much for saying what is that system because that is what I am always trying to teach. Glutathione on its own is relatively impotent. It needs – it has got so many functions through the body but it needs enzymes that drive it into each of those functions. So if we wanted to quench hydrogen peroxide or fix that lipid peroxide, we need glutathione peroxidase to make that happen. If we wanted to bind to mercury that is stuck to a protein, we need glutathione as a transferase. So we need the glutathione. We need the glutathione as a transferase to catalyze the movement of the mercury. Or, let’s side track – or arsenic, or cadmium. Transfer that from the cellular protein on to the glutathione.

Use the glutathione as a transferase. But now we have got, in the cell, a mercury-glutathione conjugate and we want to get that out of the cell. And now we need the transport system, and these are membrane transport proteins called multidrug resistance proteins and they are going to use ATP and magnesium to shuttle that mercury glutathione conjugate from the cell to the blood.

Now, we have got another transporter in that family to pull it from the blood, into the liver, then other transporter. Then dump it from the liver into the small intestine through the bile duct. Those transporters are also working in the proximal tubules of the kidney and they are working in the intestines. So we have this movement from cell to blood. Well, first, we have conjugation with the metal, movement from cell to blood, then filtration out of the blood through kidney, liver, and intestine. And right all there is the whole game of detoxification.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So you are talking about transporter proteins at each one of those steps?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: At each one of those steps so we need from inside the cell to out of the cell and then we need filtration and those are also transporter proteins and they go into the liver, right to the intestine, or into the kidney and into the urine. Of all those, the movement into the liver is the most important and that movement can be blocked and especially what gets blocked very easy is the movement and then the propagation of that movement from the liver into the intestine. It will move from the liver into the gallbladder through the bile transport and then to the small intestine. And what I see a lot of is a block between liver and small intestine.

Now, we go to our tribal knowledge, the greatest – we shouldn’t even call them tribal because they have become very scientific over 10,000 years – our systems of Chinese medicine and ayurvedic medicine. In Chinese medicine, liver, small, intestine, you bring that up to good TCM guys and they understand that as a communication system. And in our new biochemical science there is great work that demonstrates how liver and small intestine decide together how to metabolize toxins, both endogenous ones that we create and exogenous ones, the ones we take in. And when they lose the ability to communicate there is this disruption in detoxification and that disruption that blocks the movement from the liver into the small intestine I see all the time. And it can come through an accumulation of metal in the GI tract.

So in our teaching of how to detoxify, fundamental to it is to move the metals and other toxins out of the intestine and that goes back to really what has been known for a long time in naturopathy in what they call generically intestinal binders. Intestinal binders are things that move through the stomach and are not absorbed, but as they go through the GI tract they absorb the toxins. So this is the simplest of those, the clays and activated charcoal.

Then we move into ones that are more specific for metals and in the naturopathic world that is chlorella, which is insoluble cell walls of single-celled algae. And in those walls there are sulphydro groups that are bound to those walls and those sulphydro groups do the metal binding. And then you move up through ones that we have designed to have lots of sulphydro groups, like the product that we make that is a doctor product called IMD. And these are silica products, silica particles that are not absorbed. They have incredibly high surface area. They make clays look like low surface area – 300 yards per gram of this. And they have the sulphydro groups all bound onto that surface. And they go through and they bind all those metals and they take them away from those transport proteins and away from the walls of the stomach. So this chlorella can move more toxin down to the GI tract.

So working from the small intestine to clear up the small intestine, allow it to sort of reassociate with the liver, is really, really big. And one of the things that I am moving into my product line now that I am just totally enamored with is bitters. We have been using bitters – at the turn of the century it was the cure-all for everything in this new world here, but it is an old European thing. Forever the European [lineages 00:20:42] have loved bitters because bitter herbs like gentian and dandelion stimulate flow from the bile to the small intestine. And that is the route in which these toxins are moving. And we have cholestasis, blockage of the gallbladder, failure to move bile in for – bile does two things. It moves in to digest fats but it is also the highway along which all the toxins are moving. So, using bitters is really, really important for normalizing detoxification.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, so basically the main principle that you have here is you are trying to ensure that the flow is continued, right? That is one of the roles of the bitters, for example. And you are also trying to make sure the toxins are not reabsorbed and they are bound to exit them, which is what you are talking about with the binders. There are bile binders and then some of the other ones you are talking about. You did mention your product and you said it was a bit different. You called it IMD. What does IMD stand for?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Intestinal metal detox.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, all right. So the function of it, basically.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: The function is very specifically for the metals and it is to – so if we back up into the binders then we have got a world of different chemicals coming in. And there is no binder that can get every one of those different chemicals with all of their different properties. So there are classes of chemicals that each binder is good at. The most universal binder is charcoal and it does a little bit of everything. Now, you have got metal-specific binders like IMD – very, very powerful on metals and seems to do good on mold toxins but that is really its world there. Then you have got the clays like bentonite, zeolite. I know the zeolite marker is the thing that binds everything. But its ability to bind mercury is like zero. But it is very good on a number of different pesticides and herbicides.

In the mold toxins, almost all the mold toxins so on to charcoal beautifully except for the food-based mold toxin aflatoxin, which is very specific for bentonite or zeolite. And then you have got one of my favorite other binders chitosan. And that is known in the health world as being a fat binder but it is not a fat binder. It is a bio binder. The prescription biobinders are cholestyramine and welchol. Chitosan is virtually identical to welchol. The strongest of them all is cholestyramine but it can be a little binding in terms of making you constipated. So I liked a cocktail of cholestyramine, activated carbon, a little bentonite or zeolite and the IMD. And you covered everything.

The reason that we like the bio-binders that we didn’t mention in terms of toxins is because the biological toxins, Richie Shoemaker is the original guru on this. The biotoxins that you will get from molds, both growing in you and growing around you, are conjugated to different things like leukaronic acid and sulphate and they go down to the GI tract and they are biomed very effectively by cholestyramine, welchol, and chitosan, and protected against reuptake because they are internally recirculated. They have biliary recirculation and you reabsorb them. So you want those to stick on to the cholestyramine, welchol, or chitosan.

The other big toxins that are really big there are lime toxins. Lyme toxins are horrible for you, as are candida toxins. So all of those biological toxins really go after those what we call the biobinders. And that is their importance. So you put this cocktail together and you have got all toxins together and my experience with that was dramatic in terms of its clearing of my nervous system. I cleared my liver and kidneys and my immune system was functioning great by doing this metal-based stuff, but then when I did this cocktail of binders I had a very radical experience with my nervous system. It really brought it up to a higher borderline [inaudible – 00:25:17].

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, I wasn’t aware we would have this discussion. I have been playing with binders myself a lot. I have been on the Shoemaker protocol because I had those kinds of issues. Later Lyme as well came along. So we are talking about these things and one of the things I was playing around with was substituting, because I was on CSM for a while, and substituting that with other things.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Cholestyramine, yeah.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Cholestyramine, yeah, which I didn’t want to take forever because it is a drug and you mentioned some of the drugs. So I stopped taking that and I replaced with soluble fiber, just like Psyllium Husk supplements. And there is this thing called the VCS, the visual contrast sensitivity test. Mine is perfectly clear all the time now as long as I am taking soluble fiber.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: And if you stop with the fiber it gets worse?

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Well, I haven’t done that experiment. I like to feel good.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Because you kind of like it. Let’s list through the other fiber-based binders because my new best friend in the fiber-based binders is acacia gum and that is a soluble fiber. It is really cheap and one of the other things that these do, certainly the acacia gum, I think pectin does this, and they normalize the immune system and the GI tract to get you away from that hypersensitivity that people chronically get where they can’t eat everything but they host every bug under the sun. So to normalize that immune function there is a big thing and that is going to then keep down inflammatory states and increase detoxification because I didn’t say – GI inflammation breaks down this whole track of detoxification and it actually shuts down all the transport proteins until you can break that. So the soluble fibers are a big part of that and Gary Gordon was telling me that there is another product that he says replaces CSM and it is another fiber that we think of for prostate. It is almost a polyphenol. It will come to me – beta-sitosterol, that is also remembered to have these effects as well. And you are just using cilium?

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That is what I have been using for a while. I was using chlorella and [inaudible 00:27:40] and throwing everything in there but I actually haven’t been doing that consistently so it is just the cilium. It’s an experiment. It’s an N equals 1 experiment.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, well I would encourage you to try chitosan, charcoal, some clay, and IMD together, do the other fibers during the day and at night do this in a pretty decent dose, so you are taking a quarter to a half a teaspoon to see what happens. I mean, originally I started kind of stemming, like autistics do, and then there was this big flush of light through my nervous system.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, people are probably thinking this sounds crazy right now, but I have had some experiences where you bind this stuff and it is coming out of you. You will feel suicidal, you go to the toilet, and you feel like a new man. You feel great. So at first I thought I was going crazy but this stuff has happened several times. It is a repeatable experiment.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: And you get to see – I mean, you can do it at a slow rate and do it without having side effects if you are doing it – you have to have your system under pretty good control before you do high doses. I mean, one of the basics I teach are you start really slow and you titrate up because it can’t take you where we could go right now right away. It will disregulate the system instead of fix you. And the other thing is pulsing on and off with things that have genetic upregulation, the plant chemicals that turn up your antioxidant system and you have to pulse them on and off.

You have to work from slow up to high but once you have stabilized your system you’re not going to have what I call the cellular revolution, where you bring yourself up to higher functioning until you get through some high doses of things. But you have to get to know your system and you have to be able to know how to take yourself through those experiences.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: This is fascinating stuff. You have obviously had a ton of experience to guide you through this because I haven’t had a discussion quite like this before. That is really interesting. I didn’t know we were going to talk about this. Let’s talk about this or let’s talk about mercury quantification, which we shall talk about.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: All the way at the limits of where this goes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Well, it’s interesting because you started with mercury, of course. And then you led to this other stuff, which is all related because of the toxins and so on. So let’s just take a step back and say a lot of people don’t realize that we all have mercury in our bodies. But where is it coming from? Why do we all have mercury in our bodies?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Mercury is an element. It is neither created nor destroyed, which means it is always out there but the problem is when we start focusing it into different areas and using a lot of it that it gets out in very high amounts on a broadly distributed level or mining of hydrocarbons that brings it out and fertilizes the air with it. Because mercury and the environment concentrates into areas that have a lot of organic matter like the jungles and swamps that produce our hydrocarbons. And so we fertilize it into the air and it rains down into the water bodies and where there is a chemistry conducive to it forming this form called methyl-mercury that moves up the food chain into the fish and we will have fish with one to ten million times higher level that water around it. So our fish are now a source of mercury.

They have always been a source of mercury coming out of volcanos and with natural cycling, but we have it at higher levels now than we used to. Then in the fish there are different fish that have high levels and low levels and in a second we will talk about them. So the main sources now, we have got the fish and then we have got where we have concentrated it down. We have mined it, we have turned it into a metal, and then we have stuck it in our mouth like that’s a smart idea. I mean, who the F thought of that?

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, right. For the people at home if you have silver in your mouth basically, that is probably an amalgam, which means it has mercury in it, is that correct?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, I mean unless it’s a nickel cast, in which case it is nickel. Do you know what the term nickel means? Nickel is Old Nick’s metal. Old Nick was the devil because the guys who worked with nickel – it just ruined them. They turned totally crazy and they couldn’t even figure out how to fix them. So it was Old Nick’s metal, that’s nickel. Mercury, [inaudible 00:32:03] HG was water silver, and it’s really a phenomenally useful metal in chemistry and it does so many different things that it was even used in medicine. But it is just such a slippery creature it easily turns bad on you. So your metal fillings were 50% mercury and maybe 48% silver and then a bunch of other metals that help harden it and bring it together. And the word from the dental people is that it is inert. It is not inert, it is just less volatile than it was as the liquid mercury. And it is volatilizing off of your amalgams every day.

We can put a little meter in there and show you. It is not only volatilizing but it is corroding and so you are swallowing one form as a corrosion product that goes through your GI system. You don’t absorb that but it disregulates your GI system and your detox system. The other form is inhaled as a vapor, which goes right into your blood, right into your brain, right everywhere it wants to. And then breaks down the mercury vapors called elemental mercury and then it breaks down into inorganic mercury, which is when it starts getting into your systemic reactions and your enzymes and your cells. That is when it starts wreaking its havoc. So our main sources now are fish and amalgam. Secondary sources are vaccines but vaccines are rapidly either losing their mercury and gaining aluminum instead. But mercury, if you don’t have amalgam or fish you likely don’t have a real big source unless you have a source in your house.

There was a lot of mercury in industry and pharmacy and there are houses people move into where somebody used to be a pharmacist and spilled a bottle of mercury in there. They used to bring it back and give it to their grandkids to play around with because it was a liquid and a lot of it would move around. And in the big picture I believe that we’re a lot more sensitive to mercury now than we used to be. That is kind of a long discussion about it but our earlier discussion about epigenetic modification of the system that makes you more sensitive to mercury is a big part of that. I think as a population we are more sensitive to the toxic inputs than we used to be. And then you are going to hate it when I tell you what happens when you get mold exposures.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I am really interested. I have been through all that protocol. What do you understand about Shoemaker’s and the connection there?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Well I don’t think Shoemaker ever knew the connection. He just focused on the mold. And we think oh, well, it’s the mold that is making me toxic, it’s not mercury. So the mold – well, first let’s get back to your response to toxins. Your response is based on the glutathione system. But in the cytoplasm of the cell you have got this big master switch called the NRF2. When it gets triggered it goes into the nucleus and it tells your nucleus to turn on all the chemo-protective genes. So all the detox, boom, it comes up and clears everything out. The mold toxins epigenetically stop you from making the NRF2 protein.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s so nasty.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: It’s awful.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It’s really terrible and NRF2 is coming up a lot now because it is one of the tools people are using to detoxify.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, so everybody goes okay, good, then we’ll throw these plant chemicals at them. It will turn it up and everything will get better. Now, that should have already happened. And it won’t. And it should have told you to turn up your glutathione level and get rid of all this stuff but it didn’t. So now, even when I come at you with a plant-based chemical to turn that up, it doesn’t work. The switch is broken so I have to give you glutathione and I have to find a way to get it in. That is a trick. I have to slowly, slowly nurse you back to health until we can get the toxins out and until we can get that epigenetic influence away and start you running your system yourself. That’s why it is so hard to fix the multi exposure, chronically-ill person. That is why it took you so many years and so many things to get back. That data is just coming out now.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow, so you are directly – I am guessing you are using your glutathione delivery [inaudible 00:36:32] and stuff to go directly?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Right, and we have such great clinical response for that so using an intraoral liposomal delivery, you have to make the liposomes to do this in a certain size range, a certain purity range, and you can absorb right through the oral cavity as you are swallowing it through the upper GI. The liposomes have a great potential but they are really based around all their great data with all through subculture studies and injections. Once it hits the acid it is one thing, in the stomach, but the bile and the lipase – they are [surfactants 00:37:16]. They destroy your liposome system and so you really have to get absorption going as soon as you can in the upper areas.

So we have gotten phenomenal clinical response using this intra-oral delivery of glutathione and with the sick people we have to go real slow because it stimulates so much response in the system. And the most classical thing that we see is after a couple of weeks on our system the people who had Lyme disease but were the 70% of them that were non-testers, they go through a crisis and you test them and they all test positive. Because the glutathione is what the TH1 response of your immune system to that invasion is predicated on adequate glutathione. And when it doesn’t have it, it can’t create the immune response which is the basis of the testing for the Lyme.

So all of a sudden they feel like crap and I say go get your Lyme test or your Epstein-Barr test or your mycoplasma test. Test as much as you can and boom, boom, boom, I was positive for all these things when they weren’t before. And so it has really proven to be a great way to get the glutathione into the system.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So just take a step back there. You said that you can clinically test if it is having an impact. So when you add liposome or glutathione, what are you seeing? Are you looking at new blood markers or what is going on there?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Well that was the problem in the beginning and it is true for all the guys who make any kind of delivery of glutathione. It is very difficult to look at blood levels of glutathione, give them a dose, and see it happen. Because the glutathione very quickly propagates through the system and your blood has kind of set points for the glutathione level in the blood. And that signal kind of wipes out what you’re trying to look at there. So you kind of have to look at end markers. And so as a sort of community of people who make glutathione products were just finding how to test these. So I had talked to you about using some of the marker tests. I talked to you about talking to Cheryl Burdette from Dunwoody because they have nice F2-isoprostane, deoxyguanosine, oxidized LDL.

We just started a clinical trial where we are looking at changes in those markers because really biopsies would be the best thing. But most people aren’t up for biopsy testing. It is a little tricky and so we are just starting to find all the markers to really read and to quantify that. When I say clinically it has been working out well, looking at people’s response to it. Now using the test is people are testing positive for Lyme where they hadn’t before because the Lyme tests were all based on the body’s immune reaction to Lyme, not on testing the Lyme itself. So the glutathione has been working out really, really well for us.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Excellent. We spoke to Cheryl Burdette before about those markers, so people can go and check out that episode if they don’t know what we are talking about there. But basically you are looking at the downstream impact of the glutathione rather than try to measure it directly. So you can see [inaudible 00:40:33].

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Exactly, it’s a real trick.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Well, it’s nice. That is a nice way to look at it. So you said that you have to go very easy with adding liposomal glutathione to people so I tried many times to use liposomal glutathione personally and I feel way, way worse whenever I do that. So I guess I am fitting into your situation there?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, you have to move slow and make sure that you have enough [inaudible 00:40:58] in your system. I mean, that was one of the greatest things towards helping detox that has come from the methylation groups like Ben Lynch and [inaudible 00:41:08] and all the methylation obsessors. It is the integration of the methylation in with the sulphur metabolism cycle like [inaudible 00:41:19] beta-synthase and suox where they are taking sulphur groups, spinning them out towards sulphate, and they are building up as sulphite and you are getting sulphite toxicity. And so when you are taking things from the garlic and onion, the [altium 00:41:39] groups and the broccoli seed extract. A lot of people would feel much worse on them and they would say it’s a herxheimer or a detox reaction, or I am killing my bugs that are dying off. No, you have sulphide toxicity because they all have upregulated probably epigenetically as well as straight up genetically have upregulated CBS activity. They are spitting everything towards sulphate. It is building up as sulphite, which is a toxin, and they feel toxic from it. You give them Molybdenum and that whole pathway is smoothed out. I was one of them too.

And because they are like that I moved towards using polyphenols as NRF2 upregulators and the only sulfur compound I use is lipoic acid because I can get a lot of upregulation without a whole lot of sulfur. And I didn’t know exactly why that was and now I know it is CBS issues. And I stayed away from using too much of the alliums and the crucifers. But now we know molybdenum can help them use that.

Now, back to the glutathione you are bringing a lot of sulphur back into the system and you may need molybdenum to help move that but you want to start with low doses. A lot of people, like if you were using one of the other products that is out on the market. Most of them are dosed in teaspoons or sachets that are 400 to 500 mg per dose and it is way too much. And one of my friends who got me in early in this world is one of the now late and great old heroes in this movement and that was Hal Huggins. And he had done a lot of work with liposomal glutathione and he said no more than 100 mg, I think 25 mg. And there are a number of reasons for that. One is that you have to start high but you also have to see what byproducts are in the liposomal glutathione.

if you are smelling a lot of hydrogen sulfide that is not a liposome, that is hydrogen sulfide. And some of these products decay very quickly and so some of those can irritate the sulphur system. So you will have to nurse back – one, you have to deal with the glutathione stimulating your immune system and the detox system and two you have to handle all the sulfur that is coming into the system so you have to start low. I mean, ours can dose by the pump and each pump is 50 mg of glutathione and for really sick people it is like that once a day and then we slowly work you up. I mean, as you get into this deep, you might be doing 500 mg twice a day.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s amazing. Chris, you are full of a wealth of information on this detox subject. So anyway you have this company called Quicksilver Scientific where you establish this testing which is different to a lot of the functional medicine testing which looks at mercury.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Oh yeah, this is totally different.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, can you give a quick background on the original testing that you were in that posed a challenge and the weaknesses of that and then what you have done to quantify the burden as best as possible?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, so the challenge test is what was in place here before I got here. And there was a reason to use challenge tests years ago. There is still some reason to use them but they don’t give you a whole lot of information about your mercury. And this is for a couple of reasons. And they are also the hardest on the patients that need this the most, the really chronically ill people. So a challenge test, you take some chelater that solubalizes mercury in your blood and lymph and drops it through your kidneys. And it accentuates a signal that was already there. So if your urine is say, two points of mercury and we give the chelator it becomes 20 points of mercury. If your urine is three points it becomes 30 points. You know, maybe it is 100 fold.

We will go 100 fold for DMPS. SO it goes from 2 to 200 and 3 to 300, so it becomes much easier to see what is going on there. And we didn’t used to have super-sensitive equipment and obviously quite often we would see no mercury in the urine until we would chelate it and then we would see mercury. And that was just because our detection limits, how low we could see, weren’t very good. So we needed to stimulate the urinary output so that it came up to the window where we could see it. Right now we can see just about everybody at just about any level and we don’t need that stimulation anymore.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Does that go for everyone’s tests? Like the doctor’s data and all of these other labs? Are they a much lower detection limit now or is it your specific ones?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Well, they could. I think they are still doing it the same way. They could have limits where they are much lower, but they are really running things the same way they always have and that makes it, for your end – it is making it affordable for you. It is a fairly cheap way to see all the metals at once.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, if you use the post challenge, like you were saying.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Right, yeah, but if you want to really get all of the biochemical information, the biosignature of the mercury in the body, you have to move towards what we do. But now, just back towards one of the hitches with doing a challenge test, number one, if your excretion of metals out of your kidney is strongly impaired you will not get that metal that has been solubilized in your blood and lymph and out through your kidney you will get a false positive and you will feel like hell.

Number two, if you are – well, two is kind of an extension of the first one. If you are chronically ill moving that much mercury around other metals around at once makes you feel really bad. And that is not what you need.

Number three, you don’t know what form of mercury you are building up. Was it methylmercury from fish? Was it inorganic mercury from your amalgams? What was going on in there? So there is a limitation on how much information you get about source and of course, it could be totally blocked by excretion markers.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So they just put out one class of mercury. You don’t know what type of mercury is there? Are the only types that are bad for us methylmercury and inorganic mercury?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Well no, there are other bad forms you just don’t get it so much. So methylmercury is an organomercurial but in the vaccines it was ethyl mercury, which was also an organomercurial. But the ethyl mercury pretty quickly breaks down into inorganic mercury in the body. So really you have got elemental mercury coming into you through the air from your amalgams or from your environment. That is becoming inorganic mercury. You have got methylmercury coming in from the fish, which stays as methylmercury but some of it breaks down to inorganic mercury. Then you have got ethyl mercury from vaccines coming in and that is really ending up as inorganic mercury too. So the most relevant measures are the inorganic and the methylmercury.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, thanks for that clarification.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: And then when you get over to our testing we want to know how much of which is in there and we are going to go – we are going to do blood, hair, and urine. And blood is – everybody talks about burden. What is the body burden? So a lot of what grew up around the challenge test is the challenge test was really a way that given our old technology we could see and get a good feel for what was in there for what we had available to us in technology. But everybody grew this mythology up that it was the only way to see the body burden and this mythology that somehow these chelators mystically got into every cell, took a representative amount, and came up through your kidney and told you what the body burden was. In those from the 90s through early 2000s, a lot of academic groups went and evaluated whether that was correct. And I have a white paper that is on our new website about challenge testing and it discusses those five papers. And those five papers came to the conclusion that all that signal was there in the testing without the chelators, the chelators just accentuated what was going on. However, you did need decent testing to show that. And now we have that testing available to us.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Has it got a specific name or are you using something different?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: The testing that we are doing is called mercury speciation testing where the speciation part is separating in the samples, separating the methylmercury from the inorganic mercury so we can look at them independently.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: And is there a level you are looking at? Like, is there a specific – when you say it is lower level.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Well people used to be able to test – first it was in the parts per million range and it didn’t seem much and then they got down into parts per billion. We can look into parts per trillion to parts per quadrillion level. And this was all necessary for doing environmental stuff. So I built my analytical system at the University of Illinois and we built it to look at this parts per quadrillion levels of environmental mercury and then when I came into clinical we applied it to clinical. And the other thing that was out there about clinical testing in the challenge world was that blood was a lousy marker and it only showed you the last two to three days of exposure.

Now, I don’t know how that go out there because since the 70s they have known that the half-lives of these forms of mercury were anywhere between 50 and 70 days in healthy people and out to 240 days in unhealthy people. But somehow the mythology became two to three days. But really blood’s problem was that it disproportionately showed you your methyl mercury burden over your inorganic mercury burden and once we separated these two it became very, very clear and that was just because of the way that methylmercury distributed between blood and organs versus how inorganic mercury distributed between blood and organs.

Once we separate them, they are phenomenal measures. In fact, methylmercury is a perfect measure of body burden. Inorganic is pretty good – it is not perfect but it is pretty good. It is a little bit slower to distribute between when the blood comes down and it is slow to come out of the organs and resupply, so it is a little bit slow. So urine had always been used for inorganic mercury exposure because urine is all inorganic mercury. And if your kidneys are working well it is a very good representation of what the blood is, which is then a representation of what the body is. But if the kidney transporters are not working well and this is almost universally how the sick people are – they have got low filtration capacity and the urine is falsely low, giving you a false negative. It is only once we can directly compare mercury in the urine, inorganic mercury in the urine, to the blood inorganic mercury that we have got a direct measure of the metal filtration capacity of the kidneys and with that marker right there, those combinations of the blood inorganic mercury and the urinary mercury was a beautiful one to see this blockage and detoxification.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, so the change for you has been a lower level of detection for the urine plus the blood and you also had the hair in. Why are you adding the hair test?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: So urine is our excretion measure for inorganic mercury. Blood is our reservoir or burden measure for inorganic mercury. Then blood is our burden marker, our reservoir marker, for methylmercury as well, so methylmercury as well, so blood methylmercury. And then our excretion marker for methylmercury is the hair. Ideally because methylmercury doesn’t come out the urine. It is conjugated to glutathione and goes through the liver, bile, small intestine, fecal excretion. But there is a lot of changes to it as it goes through the GI tract and so the ideal measure would be bile, a bile to blood measure, but we can’t get that.

Hair has a history of papers done on it where the sickest people for a given exposure have the lowest mercury levels in the hair. And so the hair to blood ratio, blood, methylmercury very hair, hair is all methylmercury. There is no inorganic mercury excreted in the hair. So the hair to blood is our methylmercury excretion measure, whereas urine to blood is our inorganic mercury excretions.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So it is showing how well it is getting excreted.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yes.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So it correlates well with the stool because some gets excreted in the stool?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: It correlates pretty well with the stool. Really getting a good stool measure, you would want two days collection homogenization and you send it in. People really don’t like doing tests.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right. Is that why you don’t do it? It’s not something people like doing?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: There’s no compliance on that unless you have got serious GI parasites and then people will do anything. And if they don’t have parasites they don’t want to do that. They just don’t want to do that so we use the hair as a surrogate measure for how the excretion is working.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, excellent. So with this, what type of mercury it is and how well it is getting excreted or not?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, we do. And once you get used to looking at that whole picture you can look at some other processes in there. For instance, say you have only got – now let’s talk about relative toxicity of the different forms. But not nearly as toxic to the cells as inorganic mercury is. And methyl usually has a rap for being the most toxic. But it is just absorbable. So if I feed you inorganic mercury you won’t absorb it. It will just ulcerate your GI tract. It won’t make it to the brain. But if I feed you methylmercury you absorb it, it goes to the brain, and you see it’s toxic. But once they are in the body the inorganic mercury is more toxic. And if we look at animals that eat fish, the ones that demeth a lot, they break down methylmercury into inorganic mercury, they have the highest toxicity in the body.

In the brain they have the highest neurotoxic lesions on the glutamate receptors, or what I was talking about before, this hyper anxiety which causes neuroinflammation. We are able to see fish eaters without amalgams who is releasing more of the methylmercury, breaking it down into inorganic mercury. We know that those people are going to do worse on fish than the people who don’t break down so much. So we contract that demethylation movement. In other animals the toxicity from demethylation is in the liver. So we know that demethylation is a risk factor for fish eaters and we’re able to see how that methylmercury drops down into the inorganic mercury pool. So there are a couple of things that we see about how the body is processing these different forms of mercury.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, fantastic. We have kind of already gone over our mark and there is so much more to talk about because you kind of know all these other subjects. Would it be better to have another episode another date?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: We can definitely follow up and talk about treatment approach and results that we have seen, hitches in the road. There is something down here about biomarkers I like to test. I think that should be a whole separate interview.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah great because we have already covered so much here. So just to leave off today, just to get it clear for people, who should consider that mercury could be behind some issues they have, whatever they are. We talked about the anxiety, specifically, but in your opinion, if you are someone at home what kinds of things would you be suspicious of and think about, getting this types of tests?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, well one, do you have the source? Because the dysfunction that comes is common to a lot of dysfunctions or common to a lot of disease states, these morbidities we talk about. But the most common ones that come around with amalgam-based mercury are GI, joint, then fatigue issues. It is wearing down and weighing on the system.

The neurological problems, and this can come from amalgam or fish are anxiety and depression. The depression can either go along with the adrenal fatigue and sort of chronic fatigue pain syndrome that can be caused by the metals or you can have anxiety and depression cycles where anxiety is keeping you sympathetically stimulated until you crash and go into depression. So that sort of constellation of problems is the most obvious one.

In the glandular system, mercury is a serious glandular toxin and thyroid is most commonly hit by it and you will see if you are looking at quantifying things, mercury and then also cadmium and arsenic poison the deiodinase that takes T4 to T3, so if you are pooling up T4 and failing to get adequate T3, that’s a pretty specific marker for metal toxins, mercury for one but cadmium and arsenic also do that. Pituitary disregulation on a metal side is more specifically mercury and it builds up in the pituitary.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, and the pituitary can have impacts on lots of things?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Every gland. So if we were looking at hormones and you found it was your failure to make testosterone it is not peripheral, that it is – you are failing to get stimulation from the pituitary and you are not making the – I forget which one it is now, luteinizing hormone or whichever one it is that stimulates testosterone. If the pituitary is failing [inaudible 01:01:12].

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, thank you for your overview, Chris. That will help people kind of put a frame around everything we have been talking about today. Yeah, let’s continue this discussion with the other parts to treatment and some of the products and protocols and things that you have used and how you have been tracking progress and so on on another date.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, because then when we get to talking about that you will see that oh my God, this isn’t just mercury when we treat it. We are treating that globally-dysfunctional glutathione system. These things that we thought were side effects of detoxification like all this fatigue is the immune system actually responding to chronic infections. So it is a much bigger thing than going after mercury, it is going after bringing the wellness back to the body.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Well, that’s great. Chris, it has been great connecting with you, really. I think you have helped me with a few of my personal things with this discussion already and you are a fantastic talker. I look forward to having you on the show again.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: All right, thanks so much. You take care now, Damien.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Have a great day.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Bye.

[End of Audio Part One

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So, what I think we have left is to basically talk a little bit about finalizing the [inaudible 01:02:47] test. Is that the best we are going to be able to get in terms of mercury burden testing? Your perspective on that?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Well, I think it is going to take some time but the next generation will be figuring out a way to be imaging it organs, especially the brain. I think the one trick that we still have is that we are trying to apply some number that we get to the mythical body burden. I think that certain people end up hyper accumulating it in different organs and this is something that people who do applied kinesiology or things like that have long –

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Can MRIs pick this up?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: No, I don’t think they can.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Some of the scans they are using to identify lead in bones, for example, could use similar approaches?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: There might be something that they are using for the bone lead and they will figure out how to do it for mercury. Mercury is present at much lower concentrations. I think they just haven’t figured out how to do that yet. It may be ten plus years away or more, but eventually we will be able to see that because there seems to be a hyper accumulation that happens in some people. The brain, for certain, is a big issue when you have a lot on the brain and certain people exposed to it, certain mercury vapor, and can have a lot in their brain. And even after the blood levels and the whole body levels have come down, the brain, because of the blood brain barrier is very, very slow to release the mercury. So people that were dental assistants years ago, it is really hard to test them and know what is happening neurologically. I think other organs hyper accumulate too, especially the thyroid and maybe the prostate and ovaries. So that will be the next level up, doing that kind of a thing.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah, but you think it is quite a way off, like a decade?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, I haven’t seen that we have that technology yet.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: And you also mentioned it is in lower concentrations. So it sounds like it is more toxic than lead at lower concentrations and we have lower concentrations so it is going to be harder to detect than the [inaudible 01:04:58].

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yes, for sure.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: All right. So, you also mentioned dentistry, like people working in dentistry and their exposure to mercury. I guess that is one of the most – the kind of biggest cases that you may come across in normal dentistry. So I am just wondering if that is a big area of your practice? People getting tested and coming up with the highest levels?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: I can’t say that they always have the highest levels because we are working with biological dentists, so they have already made the leap into understanding the toxicity and they are basing the value of their practice on offering mercury-safe dentistry. So they have already started to protect themselves. They remove things in a highly-protected environment. They don’t leave amalgams sittings around. They don’t install amalgam. So they don’t tend to be super high. If we were just getting general practice dentists, I think we would see them being pretty high.

But by and large, the highest people that we see are people who eat a lot of fish, that are high up the food chain. A lot of tuna and swordfish, large ocean-going fish. And usually if they have that and they have amalgams too at the same time their detox system is weak and they are loading a lot of mercury in, all the time.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right. So to give you a quick personal thing, I had some mercury removed from my teeth last week in LA. It’s a bit of an interesting story because first of all, I didn’t realize I had any mercury and what happened is I was in Thailand three year ago and they have good professional dentistry and medical services and it is offshore, low-cost, but pretty high standards. So they did remove some amalgams but they didn’t remove them completely. They left some underneath the new composite resin placed on top, which I don’t know if you have come across before. And then they actually gave me a report which said there were no amalgams left. So I have had chronic health issues and I was going forward thinking like –

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, I do run into this fairly often because they leave that in there as a structural support and they are just kind of being too lazy to pull it out because then they will have to do some real reconstructive work.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, yeah, so it turned up in the x-rays that he biological dentist in LA was like, ‘Oh, this really shiny thing, that is probably mercury.’ And sure enough, once she dug in there, there was mercury that was oxidized. It looked really messed up in there. So is that something that happens a lot? I am just wondering if I am really unlucky.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: No, it happens more than we would like to think, even some of the biological dentists do that. They are not supposed to and most of the guys that I work with are really, really good. But I have certainly seen it happen before and for sure with a lot of the mainstream dentists because they regard it a good structural thing. And thing well now it is sort of buried underneath this composite and it is not reacting with the environment anymore and maybe it’s not a problem, but I have definitely been able to see that. If you come to me and you don’t really eat much fish at all and all your amalgams are gone and I analyze you I should see certain levels. So I have been able to pick that up in certain people and say yeah, you probably have amalgam under your crowns. And I am usually right about that based on just our testing and being able to see what is still left over.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. So it is pretty important to choose the right dentist if you want to get this stuff removed to make sure it is done properly. Do you have a list that you use or something? Or could we maybe link to a list that you have?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: There are various lists. The best – I don’t maintain a list. I do, when people ask me, I will tell them who I think are really good. There are two things going on. The one is safe removal that is protecting you against the mercury that you would inhale when you remove it. And most people doing this work get that right. The other thing is just being really good technicians and doing exceptional dental work. And it’s a big part of it. If you get all your amalgams out, but it wasn’t good technical dentistry it leaves you with a whole host of problems coming down the road because well-placed composite should last decades. And often it is not put in right so there are two aspects there. So I tend to keep my personal recommendations to people who I have seen their work. So it is not a really long list.

So I deferred to Leo Cashman at DAMS and Leo Cashman at DAMS.org, I think. They have a website and he has been a relentless advocate for safe dentistry. And he really does investigate whether people are doing a good job, whether dentists are doing a good job. He keeps a list of people he can refer and he checks up on them to make sure that they are coming through. And people, if they don’t like their work, complain to him and he checks up on that. So he is my favorite go-to list as far as a list that is not just a professional list. So he is who I would look to.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That is great. It was a pretty crazy experience. They put like a big vacuum in your mouth. They put oxygen on your nose and you are fully covered, your face as well. And they are wearing gas masks.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, and people ask me about what I think about doing all of that. A lot of dentists who are new to holistic dentistry look at that and it is like, Jesus, people look like a bomb squad. And that is the best they can do to protect everyone involved but it has got a slightly traumatic feel to it. And so I don’t necessarily say that dentists need to go that far if they have at least a very clean environment.

But the dentists are out on the front lines getting this stuff out and no matter how much protection they have, there are still little micro bits of it that go right through all their clothing and they are being exposed. And so I spend a lot of time in the holistic dental world and we try to give them all the access to testing and we try to support them in however they want to detox because they do need that support.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah. Thanks for looking at that because it seems like it is an important area there.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: It is huge. It’s huge. I don’t think we even understand all of the things that amalgams do to us. I think they have a strong effect on the GI tract and what I teach in detox is all based on being able to conjugate a toxin into glutathione or one of the other molecules we use for that. And transport it down mostly to the GI tract. When you have got a disturbance in the GI tract, including a buildup of metals, you block up that whole system and it has to sort of do the best it can. it pushes a lot to the kidneys and overloads the kidneys. I think there is a lot of collateral damage from amalgam beyond just the mercury that gets into our biochemistry.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Well this is just anecdotal but after a day of feeling a bit rough – and I assume that after all the precautions taken there would be some mercury released while they are taking this stuff out.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Even just the changes to your bite registration have profound effects on you.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah, exactly. Just the dental work itself is quite heavy. But after that I have been recovering in steps from my chronic issue and since then I have felt like I have jumped another step again. So just anecdotal. I haven’t done any more testing yet but just for the sake of taking another step.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, and there are people, myself included, who have big experiences when they remove all that metal out of their mouth. There are so many things going on that we barely understand but a lot of people have profound emotional releases or spiritual changes or just physical changes. But there is no shortage of anecdotes of what happens to people when they get that out.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, great. So, in terms of other kinds of example case studies in the population where you would find higher levels, you are saying people who are eating a lot of fish. I don’t know – can you point out specific populations? Like body-builders, when I was body-building I was eating a lot of tuna and chicken, so I probably helped both my arsenic and mercury levels back when I was doing that. Are there any specific other populations or patterns that you see?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: They tend to be kind of affluent groups in the northeast and on the west coast that eat a lot of fish and they see it as a healthy choice for themselves. And they don’t buy the cheap fish, they like the affluent aspect of eating these tuna steaks and swordfish. You know, the most famous serious victim to it was the CEO of IMAX. And he still walks with a cane despite being in his upper 40s. And he was eating swordfish and tuna, two meals a day, and working out and thought he was super healthy until his nerves started failing him and he couldn’t hit the ball playing racquetball. And soon he was limping. And he had exceptionally high levels of mercury and he has got permanent neurological damage from that. There was another book put out by a doctor up in San Francisco, kind of scanning my bookcase for the name.

It was Diagnosis Mercury and I don’t remember the name of the doctor, but she had all these cases of these affluent women coming in and having these neurological issues and emotional issues that were neurological things, serious anxiety and depression and then they were starting to get neuropathies. And these women had very high blood mercury levels and it turned out they were rich women going out and eating swordfish all the time. And so I get a lot of LA, a lot of San Francisco, and a lot of New York and Boston people, and a lot of Hawaii people with very, very high levels just from the fish consumption.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So we talked a little bit about how to get this stuff out of you in terms of your recommended treatment approach last time. We talked about some of the binders and I think we touched on [inaudible 01:15:32]. Could you kind of outline how you approach getting this stuff out of people safely. How long does it take? You have noted there that some people suffer from this permanently, like they have permanent damage. Is that kind of how intense the mercury contamination has been, or is it prolongation even if it is kind of lower level? Or is it a combination of the two?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: I think it’s a combination of the two. I mean, in the IMAX guy’s case he had blood levels of 75 to 100. He might have gone up to 125 at one point. And those are radically high levels. I mean, those are ten times higher than what I say is high. And actually in the last year I have had a handful of cases also with really high levels, but it was elemental mercury or inorganic mercury exposure. But those very high levels create the permanent damage. The more chronic levels that most people are exposed to tend to produce chronic problems and they don’t tend to be as permanent. There are some things you can’t pull yourself out of or there will be some residual damage but for the most part with chronic toxicity issues, we can reverse that and reversing that, the core of doing that is turning up the glutathione system. And we will talk about the three major components of that and then what can be called the drainage system. Drainage is an old European word for having your kidneys, liver, and GI tract be able to filter your blood. So we need the cells to be able to push the mercury out, then we need – and they are pushing it out as glutathione complexes. And then those need to get filtered out.

So for the glutathione system to work, there are three main parts. Well, let’s talk from cell outward. We need glutathione, for sure, and we need adequate levels of glutathione. And then we are going to link the glutathione on to the mercury. And we need an enzyme called glutathione S-transferase that catalyzes that linking there. And then we have to transport that out, and that transport is from the cell to the blood, from the blood to the liver or kidney, and then out from there. From the liver it is going out through the bile tract into the small intestine. And from the kidney it is going out to the bladder and then out as urine.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: SO when you give someone your liposomal glutathione – I mean, there are many products out there and I understand – I think we spoke last time that you have put yours at a specific level. You could probably re-explain that, but basically you give that liposomal glutathione to get the glutathione up. Is it feeding both of those systems you just mentioned? The glutathione and the glutathione transferase?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Well, glutathione S-transferase is an enzyme that takes the glutathione in one hand and the mercury in the other hand, and links them together. So the glutathione S-transferase is a separate thing and it uses glutathione as a substrate. So the liposomal glutathione is certainly to get the glutathione levels up and provide glutathione to the system to use. The glutathione S-transferase, we can’t provide that directly. We need to turn up the body’s ability to make that. And so we use a combination of our lipoic acid and polyphenolic antioxidants.

So there is a trigger in the cytoplasm of the cell that when it is activated goes into the nucleus and turns on a lot of your chemoprotective genes. Chemoprotective genes like the glutathione S-transferase. And they are called chemoprotective because they are protecting you against chemicals that are coming in or chemicals that you are making inside your body that are bad for you. And this trigger responds to a number of things that are in our diet. And one group are polyphenolic antioxidants like you would get from green tea extra or red wine extract, grape seed extract, pine bark extract, or then you have sulphur-containing chemicals that come dominantly from alliums and crucifers. Alliums being garlic, onion, and leeks and crucifers being broccoli, cabbage, bok choi, that kind of thing.

Then the other sulphur-based chemical that does this and does it really well is lipoic acid and specifically the form called R-lipoic acid. So we use a blend to bring up that enzyme system and we use dominantly polyphenols and lipoic acid because of their ability to hit this main trigger.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, yes, and I think we touched on before that you use the polyphenols instead of the sulphur-based.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, I use them more than sulforaphane, which would come from broccoli seed extract because the mercury-toxic patients tend to have deranged sulphur processing and they over process sulphur chemicals down towards sulphate and they get held up as sulphite and it gives them some sulphite toxicity. And so the crucifers and the alliums seem to irritate that system. So we stick with the polyphenols. They tend to do better for that.

And then the one sulphur that we use is the lipoic acid. And I think it mentioned before it has two functions. One is to bring up the chemoprotective genes and the other function is that it stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis and improves mitochondrial efficiency. And that is a big problem for anybody who is chronically ill, having enough energy. The mitochondria get very damaged. And the mitochondria get damaged by heavy metals, most specifically mercury, cadmium, and arsenic. So if we can turn up detox and help the mitochondria at the same time then we have got a great compound to use.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: And to be clear, when you are talking about the chemoprotective genes you are talking about NRF-2?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, NRF-2 is the protein that is outside of the nucleus and moves in to the nucleus and turns up all of these. So that is what we are trying to stimulate. It is a little bit tricky when people are really sick. Sometimes those targets are hard to work with. I think I mentioned before that mold toxins epigenetically regulate NRF-2, meaning that you are not making so much of that trigger because it is not even out there to activate. So we need to get the mold toxins out so we are feeding in glutathione and trying to nurse the system back to health using whatever level of enzymes we have in there. And this is a big part of titrating up doses, starting low because a lot of these ill people, even if we wanted to hit all those targets once and get the body to tune itself up and throw out all these toxins, a lot of these targets are damaged or they are not being expressed right. So we have to slowly nurse it back to health.

For the sickest people you have got to be going back and giving them clay foot baths and clay baths and trying to use the skin as much as possible. Slowly having them eat small amounts of clay and charcoal and really going through a slow, slow detox that someone like myself, at the point I am at – I can take in a cup of clay internally and it isn’t going to provoke much of a change in me. But for someone who is really ill, even a teaspoon of clay is shaking the tree a lot. So we have to nurse a lot of these things back to health. And that is why you need something like a liposomal glutathione instead of just giving them precursors like cysteine or [inaudible 01:23:36] or whey protein.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. So you continue to detox yourself from mercury.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Oh, yeah, that and everything.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Okay, so in your personal case do you think there are stores – kind of like, I spoke to Dr. Gary Gordon about lead reserves. And he talks about cases of lead where he will get his patients down to pretty much clear of lead and they come back two months later and it is 90% back out where it was because it is coming out the bones.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, and he probably exaggerates his numbers a little because he likes – but the story is true. There you have got these bone reserves that are releasing it so you do have to come back periodically and go after it. In mercury we tend to talk more about proteins because there is less – it doesn’t work into the bone structure the way that lead does. So we talk more about proteins and deep inside the peptides as those turn over you are getting release from farther in there. And there definitely is sort of the available reserves or the available mercury that you can get out now versus what shows itself over time.

But we do a pretty slow detox. People are five months minimum on a detox unless it is just a little detox. But the sicker people are doing it as long as two years. But then I really want you to make detox and feeding these aspects of detox, the glutathione, the glutathione S-transferase, and the binders that we talked so much about last time. I want you to make those part of your life, not every day but in pulses. I mean, now is a great time of year to do a lot of detox. We are eating super heavy food and now we have availability to fresh vegetables all the time. But it is not the same as eating in season. So we eat heavy food and it is the end of the year. It is a good time to keep flushing a lot of that junk away. I see a lot of people get sick this time of year and if you are keeping yourself clean that doesn’t happen.

Then you are getting a lot of you are going to all these parties, you have got alcohol metabolites building up, and you clear those things out the same way you are clearing out all the other toxins. So we talk about mercury, but it is really everything. Because that same system, we are tuning up a system that throws all the junk out. It is not just the mercury.

But then back to the mercury, the brain takes so, so long to detoxify and I spent a lot of time last year – I mean, I really started my mercury detox back in like 2008 and figured it out. Maybe 2007 even because I really drove myself the wrong way using DMSA, and then figured out this whole system to pull me out of it. And then in 2009 I started getting it out to the world, so I have really been doing this for seven years. There is always more improvement to be found, especially neurologically. And this last year I was doing a lot specifically for the brain. And I am aging and I am in my mid-40s and really do slow down a lot, but on a lot of levels I am healthier than I have been since I moved out here and started this company in 2005. So you can just keep peeling off layers and bringing yourself to higher and higher levels.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: That’s great to hear. So you said you pulse – to take you as an example, how often are you pulsing so your glutathione or the alpha-lipoic acid and stuff, are you taking that once per week? And are you taking the binders daily or are you – what are you doing on your own personal level?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: I am probably not as systematic as I should be for a scientist. I do it more as needed. So, in November I had four weeks in a row where I had a conference to go to every week. So I was on the road Thursday through Sunday four weeks in a row, including the last one, to Europe. And then I came back here and there was a health crisis in my family. And then I had one more show after that so I was really under the gun. And I was using a lot of products then and I was using – at night I used a lot of gaba and glutathione to let me recharge and let me sleep deep and recharge. I used a lot of C – lipoic during the day to just keep everything flushing through.

And so I was kind of on a long sort of support and detox while I was going through all that. Other times maybe I will take less and then I will think okay, it’s time to start using IMD for a while and I will take IMD every day. And I might take a little EDTA with that and some glutathione. And I will do that every day for two weeks. And then I will just – or maybe ten days. And maybe I will lay off of it for a while. The things I take the most constantly are the C – lipoic and the glutathione. I have a lot of snips for glutathione genes and for superoxide dismutase genes, a couple of methylation things. And so those, having those pretty consistently has been real good for me.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. When you say C-lipoic acid, is that helping the SOD? Or how are you supporting the SOD?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Well the SOD – I don’t know how to directly activate SOD other than through NRF-2. So the lipoic acid should be bringing up SOD expression but then making sure that the rest of – you know, the antioxidant system is vastly interconnected with all kinds of antioxidants playing into these interweaving circles and so if I supply enough glutathione and vitamin C the SOD sort of has some of the weight taken off of it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: So the important thing you bring up there is the pulse approach. And I have started to hear about this more from people where basically we are talking about their organism, as you were just saying, is very dynamic. We have got lots of linkages between different parts of our body and our body also tends to try and adapt to things and there is regulation –

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Habituating to it.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, right. So if we are taking glutathione every single day, eventually is that going to start working against us? People talk about this pulse approach too.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, it’s a great thing to talk about and I teach a lot on that because it is so huge. It’s biggest with therapies that are based on activating certain gene sets and the coolest data set I have on that was using St. John’s Wort and looking at phase two and phase three detox enzymes and they found two things. One is that you don’t upregulate at low doses, only at really fairly substantial doses. And the other big thing was how you could do it. And so they had these mice on this high dose of St. John’s Wort and they were watching the upregulation of these enzymes and they saw it climb from 100%, which was the baseline, up to 300% of baseline over ten days. So a threefold increase of expression, that’s pretty good.

Then, over the next 20 days, as they continue to take that dose it dove down to where at day 30 it was no different than day one. The total habituation to this input – and they probably started tearing apart the input before it would activate those genes. So we start people pulsing five days on, two days off, and then we move them up to ten days on, four days off. And in doing our detox based on glutathione system upregulation, it is crucial to do this. It is less crucial down the road in your maintenance phases where you are just sort of making sure all these inputs are in there. That is why I am not as methodical as I used to be about it because everything is working pretty well for me. But when you are trying to get yourself better that is really crucial because otherwise you are taking something – most of these plant compounds that we take are activating genes.

I love to use Chinese medicine as the quintessential early example of how to do pulsing. I don’t know if you have ever gone in your journey to a real, authentic Chinese doctor who will diagnose you and then will take you into his apothecary and pull out drawers of herbs, dried herbs, and will put out a big piece of paper. You will start putting all the herbs together on there until there is a pile, a big pile of herbs on there. And you are supposed to cook that down to a little cup of tea over like two hours and drink that and then fill it up with water and cook it down to another cup, then throw it out and do it again. So you are getting high doses and you are only doing that for five to seven days. And that is upregulation of gene sets. I know that we will find that out, that is what they are doing. And there are even some – I have data papers where they are showing upregulation of NRF-2 through using Chinese herbs. And we will start finding all kinds of other gene sets that were upregulating.

The most exciting stuff is reversing epigenetic hyper methylation of genes. It is turning genes off and there are starting to be data sets coming out with that. So really that is the most exciting stuff that I am doing right now. What I am really going to focus on in 2015 are new products that we release that are going to take away the epigenetic block from the mold so that we can access those gene targets more effectively.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I can’t wait for that to come out.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, yeah, it’s pretty exciting stuff. So in March we are going to start releasing that.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, I will keep in touch for that because that is probably something I want to be using myself.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, I want to get you on that. Maybe we could get you on it ahead of the game.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yeah, that would be cool. Thank you very much. So I love this pulse approach because it kind of comes back to hormesis, right?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, it is. All these things are hormetic. They are toxins. Polyphenols come at you as polymers of different monomers and like a monomer like [inaudible 01:34:10], if you bought it as a pure monomer and put a cell culture, it will kill the cells. As the polymer it is just less damaging and those targets – the NRF-2, the way it turns on the NRF-2 is by actually creating free radicals. It creates little free radical reactions and they are just not that damaging but they are enough to turn on the NRF-2. The sulphur compounds are better at doing it like sulforaphane but they are more cytotoxic too because it is generating a little free radical storm.

So all these things are hormetic and you want the most upregulation with the least challenge to the system. And make no mistake about it, they are all hormetic, so they all should be pulsed. And so my window is ten days as your optimum. And you can do less than that if you don’t want to challenge the system as much but anything beyond 20 is a waste.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, and that is something that you said you were going to be looking more at as an antioxidant marker and oxidative stress markers related to that to see the downstream effect?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Actually that was related to the liposomal glutathione study going on right now looking at free radical gene damage that is [inaudible 01:35:26] guanosine and free radical damage to lipids – that is F2 isoprostanes. And then oxidation of LDL cholesterol. So right now we are looking at the liposomal glutathione for mitigating those damages. That we are doing because it is hard to measure glutathione in blood because there is a big background already. And so a lot of this stuff transports and gets places and gets used up really quick. Some stuff is easy – the B12 is easy, doing clinicals on EDTA was based on lead excretion, but glutathione was a little tricky so we are going to base that on damage.

I am trying to work with – it is not like she is trying to be difficult, I haven’t called her yet, but Cheryl Burdette. That is just me being [inaudible 01:36:14].

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Actually, I have been in touch with her recently and just [inaudible 01:36:18] the labs, because I was going to get them done. So I think it is just a new year.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: So I will get with her and contract to do a certain number of analyses there. I do want to look more on the hormetic side of bringing down these markers, you know, how these different polyphenols and neutraceuticals turn up those protected mechanisms. The first one we do is glutathione and that is already starting right now but we will do more work that way and we will probably do that with Cheryl.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, and you are going to be able to compare? Your liposomal glutathione is different to others. Will you be able to compare the difference?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: It just depends on whether I want to pay a lot of money to measure somebody else’s product. Getting clinicals done costs $2,000 to $3,000 per person. It is really expensive.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, and how many people do you need to make it reasonable?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Well, you need at least ten to get some pilot data going. So there you look at $30,000 just to get some data that validates what you have been seeing a few years and so it is not the kind of things that I want to – say, here is us compared to three other brands. At least until people start buying more and then we will go after that.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Again, I wanted to [inaudible 01:37:40] giving some people some ideas of recovery in terms of treatment. What kind of timelines do you see? You have mentioned a lot about the healing crises, right? So you have to go slow with many of them because if you try to go too fast it gets too problematic with detox symptoms. So what kind of timelines do you see? I mean, some people get better in a week and some people take two years – what kind of different variations?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, it is really variable so maybe if we talk about some basic types of people. The sort of textbook example of the detox is you get into it, you are starting five days on and two days off. In your first month the first week you are a little tired towards the end of your first five days. And you are just a little bit pushed down and then on your days off you get your energy back and then the next week you are pushed down but not as far and you bounce back on your days off. By your fourth week at that dosing level you don’t notice it at all and then the next month you jump up to a higher dosing and you go through the same thing, first week, the first couple of – the end of the first week is a little hard and then it gets easier. And so you are going through that process with feeling it and over that first three months you are noticing overall your daily energy is getting stronger, some of the aches and pains in your joints are going away, your skin is clearing up, maybe your hormones are normalizing, and you go through the first three-month pack and then you move into the two-month pack and you get even more results. So a three-month minimum to sort of clear yourself up, five months is more average. But then you have other types of people.

So there is one guy here who is working for us who has got some neuropathy in his leg and about the third month his neuropathy started getting better and you could see a lot of changes in him. His skin color was getting better, his energy through the day was better, because the first month he said, ‘Is it normal for me to be tired?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah it is.’ And he was going through a little bit of a – he was feeling it. But now he is reaping the rewards and he is in about month three.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Is there any way to completely avoid the [inaudible 01:40:05]? If you go really slow?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, if you really don’t have anything wrong with you, just protectively. But these are all pretty minimal symptoms, you are a little tired. You are going to go through some of this. But you are going to go through some of this stuff. If you go really, really low and slow, you may not. The more intensely you try to do it, the shorter amount of time, the more symptoms you are going to have. The more you spread it out the less symptoms you are going to have, but the longer it is going to take. But also, if you don’t get to higher doses you are not going to have the more profound changes occur. So there is a little bit of a mix here.

Now, on the harden end, you get to these people that you are in the low dosing and you are in the first week where they are just exhausted and you have to back off to half those or even a quarter dosing. These people are going to take a year to go through this and we used to back them off to drainage remedies or homeopathic or herbal remedies to sort of start the movement of the lymphatics and get the kidneys and the liver gently working again. And we still have those tools that we still use with good effect, but people who run into a wall and really can’t get past, they can’t get up in their dosing, almost always have a chronic infection and I think I mentioned before quite often they come in to this thinking that they have Lyme but their Lyme test was negative and they get two or three weeks into the detox and they are exhausted and then they go and retest for Lyme and they are more exhausted than they were when they started. Then they go back and they retest for Lyme and it comes to the positive. Because as you reboot the glutathione system and you get your glutathione levels back up. Your immune system turns back on until you get more of that TH1C response to the infection and those are the things that make you feel infection, they make you feel crappy. So then they know that they have got Lyme or Epstein-Barre or cytomegalovirus or toxoplasma and then they can go and treat those and once they get a little bit of that knocked back and they have gotten farther in their antimicrobial treatment, since it is a lot easier to get into our detox.

So we have pretty much found that if the detox isn’t working for you there is an infectious problem. And if it didn’t test for you before, it will now. So once you deal with that problem or start getting that under control, then you can get back into your detox and go farther with that. So it is kind of good news, bad news. The bad news is you weren’t able to detox and the good news is that at least we know now what was one of the other underlying problems with you and we can treat that and get you moving forward.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, and as you mentioned before it is like peeling the layers of an onion on all these chronic conditions. You find one thing, you solve that, and you feel a bit better. Then you find another thing and you kind of work your way through the maze.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, but as you get through those layers you get more and more powerful. Your strength comes back and you go through each level much faster and your improvements are greater each time. And it is really important for the chronically-ill person to gauge where they have been and how far they have gotten, especially the real ambitious ones. And a lot of these ones that are poor methylators and have gotten really chronically-ill are incredibly ambitious and aren’t good at measuring their progress. And you often need family members or people who know them to remind them how far they have come.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: And I certainly can reflect back on that myself by one of these ambitious ones. And unfortunately I have a ton of data as well and it can go oh, this can be very different. But there have been some points along the journey. I don’t know if I am getting anywhere with all of this stuff, but I clearly had.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, because we habituate to wherever we’re at. We accommodate feeling absolutely horrible and then when we are up to kind of bad it still feels the same. And all we want is to be all the way back.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Exactly, that’s one I can talk about – 100%, you want to be 110%. I want payback for the time I was under 100%, right. So to learn more about the biomarkers we have been talking about today and some of the products you have been talking about – do you have research on your site? Or are there other places, books, you would recommend to learn more details and more about this research and stuff?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Well, starting with our website, QuickSilverScientific.com – we just put up a new website and we are kind of populating it now. There is a fair amount of material under mercury and heavy metal testing on – and there are videos there of me describing our testing and showing a lot of different examples of it. Under the products there are a number of product pages about many of our different products. Some are just available by doctor login. And there is some basic information on the detox system and how that is supposed to work. I am still just starting to populate articles into the science section so you can read more about what this is all based on. This is all coming from basic research that is being done around the world, and I have been funneling it all down into a usable system. So I am sort of still getting to where I have time to publish all of this. So anything that I have put up there will be pretty – it is only for the connoisseurs. It is not for the – it will take some wading through the scientific material.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It is pretty technical, is what you’re saying?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: It is pretty technical and I am trying to get to where I have got some personal time to write some of this stuff up in some of the progressive medical articles, the integrated medical articles and journals. And so that will come over the next year or so.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. Is there anyone besides yourself that you would recommend to talk to about this area, like mercury systems you have been talking about or people you respect that you have kind of learned from?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Good question. No, there is only me. That’s all there is. [Boyd Haley 01:46:32] has always been good on this. He is pursuing a chelator that he is developing now and so most of the things that he talks about are in support of why everybody needs this chelator. But he has got a lot of stuff in there over time. But this really – all this emphasis on fixing the biochemistry inside the body to be able to resist the load, this is really new. All the language before has really been how to use a chelator to get this stuff out of the body, not how the body naturally chelates it and how we turn that back up. So I am kind of at the forefront there and I’m the only guy really talking a lot about how that works.

But functional medicine is expanding at a rapid rate and there is really good work being done there. It tends to be mostly in the doctor world. Cheryl Burdette and I lectured at Metabolic Maintenance Institute, which is a doctor training institute where we both have the faculty appointments to George Washington University now and it’s real high-end. The material being lectured on there was all awesome but it is really just going to the doctor’s now and really funneling [inaudible 01:47:56].

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: I mean, you are getting the information out there now. So is it big classes of 50 people?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: I don’t remember what the – I think this was the first one they did of this particular segment. I think there were 30 doctors there and there will be more as we go. But it was very intensive lecturing. It was just all day, just all this really high level stuff coming from different angles and all the faculty there was top notch. Jim Lavalle is part of that, Andrew Hayman, Russ Jaffey. All their stuff was really, really high level. And so now it needs to funnel down into books too, and people ask me all the time. I told people I would write a book in 2015 and I don’t know how empty of a promise that has got to be. But we will see.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: It seems like you could write ‘the’ mercury book.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, I definitely could write the book now. It is just a question of the time to write it. So maybe it will be 2016 but I am going to have to come through with that and I will have more materials on our website. But all by way of saying I don’t know who to point you to. It is all coming together up at the highest levels of training the doctors, PhDs and MDs lecturing and doing research up there. It just needs to funnel its way down.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Now just a couple of questions about you and what you are doing in terms of your own personal stuff. What data metrics do you track for your own body on a routine basis, if any?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: I don’t do a whole lot of testing all the time. I do some standard stuff every couple of months – complete blood counts and metabolic panels, GGT and liver enzymes and lipid panels, hormone panels, and also the standard stuff that like an anti-aging doctor would do and make sure that my hormones are well-balanced and all my chemistry is clean. But even though I play the PhD on TV, I do a fair amount of energetic testing on myself just to see what supplements are best for me and what organ systems might be going out of whack before anything clinical happens. And I have been fortunate enough to learn a lot of good systems from people and they work well on monitoring myself and so I will use them to sort of gauge what supplements I am going to focus on at any one time.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great, so what energetic systems are you talking about here? Can you give an example?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, let’s see – there is one called a [inaudible 01:50:34] which is sort of a dowsing technique that I use. I use a lot of muscle testing combined with organ points, which are essentially acupuncture points. And there was this system SGOT, AK-SGOT – they started doing it. They defined all these muscle testing points for different reflex points in your body that are supposed to correspond to different organ systems, so a liver, gallbladder, kidney, small intestine, large intestine, brain points. And so I will use those. There was a guy named Bob Walker who taught me more about those. His system was called [inaudible 01:51:19]. I lectured a lot with [Klinghart 01:51:24] and I learned his system.

So between all those I came to something that works for me, but mostly it is by and large muscle testing acupuncture points and looking for disturbance along those and then what normalizes those. And that has worked out exceptionally well for me and I do use that with other people as well. I tend to get mostly doctors that come – I am a PhD. I don’t treat patients but I treat a lot of doctors.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Well, so it is very interesting that you are using this and I guess you are using that in areas where testing is not available or it is too expensive.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, or testing only sees gross changes. So it is a combination of all of those. Do I want to draw some blood now? Do I want to pay for this test? Does this test actually show me what I am looking for or does it only show up on the test once it has gone pretty far? I think once you have learned the biochemistry and you have that all under wraps, then if you have some energetic testing to guide you that is when you really shine because you are left with a ton of different products that theoretically can do what you want them to. How do you work through what the best one for you is, or the best one that is out there on the market right now? And there you are stuck with energy medicine to figure that out. And when it is not right it is quite good.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Great. What is the one biggest insight that you have taken about your biology that has maybe had the biggest impact that you have drawn to date over time, the thing where you are like oh, my personal biology is like this. Because of something you have tracked?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Oh yeah, the craziest thing that I have figured out in the last year was in the holistic dental world they talk about connections between what are called cavitations, the most simple cavitation would be where you pulled a wisdom tooth out and they leave this thing called the periodontal ligament in there and it rots over time. I had a cavitation in my lower back right molar where it used to be a wisdom tooth. And it was enough that you could see it on an [I-Cat01:53:34] and I wanted to figure out a way to get that better without digging in there and going in surgically and cleaning it all out. And I had tried ozone therapy and a lot of different things. It was giving me chronic GI issues, where I had to work on them constantly. They say it is on one of the meridians that goes down to your GI system and controls your GI system and your spleen. It was always – I mean, I was just working on my GI system all the time. And I would get ozone injected in there and it would be better for a couple of days and then it would go back. And everybody is at least using energy testing because nobody dug in there to do a biopsy or anything. And everybody said that it was a fungus that was in my GI tract and in there.

And if you recall what I was talking about with epigenetic changes from funguses, funguses have this ability to turn down a lot of your repair and defense systems. And one of the products that I have for reversing that is a nanoparticle of DIM. And I started using that, holding that over my cavitation, and it changed everything within a matter of a couple of days. I did that three or four months ago, I started doing that, and it reversed all of my GI issues. And people muscle test me on that cavitation and it tests strong now. And now I just think if I keep that therapy on for a year I am going to do another [I-Cat 01:55:04] on it and see if the hole is closed up at all. My dentist had said right before I started doing this – he did ozone and he said that hole – like, I put that needle in without drilling. You are going to have to work on that. And then I started doing the DIM and he was blown away. He was like, ‘I can’t believe that.’ So we will see.

But it was really – you know, I am around holistic dentistry all the time and they talk about these systemic problems that come from the dental area and this was mine and I reversed it this way and I haven’t had a problem since. And just whenever you see that happen it is like wow, this really is what is going on with a lot of people.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, that is great. I had never actually heard of the cavitation and how it can rot and cause problems in the gum bacteria and infection. Just last week I was talking to a surgeon about removing my wisdom teeth and he takes a biological approach where he clears it all out. And I guess most dentists don’t even look at that, right? They just leave it?

[Dr. Chris Shade]: No, they leave that little tip in the periodontal ligament and they assume that the body is going to repair after that. And it does not always do that. In fact, most of the time it doesn’t. And if they had gone in farther or dug it out more it would have been okay. And so you get this little pocket of rot and what they do usually to treat it is they go in and they scoop that stuff out. And I have seen videos of this and it is pus and rot and they say it stinks. And they have to grind down to new bone with burs and scrape up the new bone, and that stimulates it to come in and grow back. And even then it doesn’t always work but at least that does stimulate a regrowth.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Wow, okay. I am glad you brought that up. Well, Chris, thank you so much for all this information and detail. It is all this new stuff, as you were saying, this biochemical approach to healing these kinds of heavy metal issues beyond chelation, which I had never heard before. And I wasn’t aware we were going to get so deep into this when we started this whole journey in the first part of the interview, so thank you so much for all the information and it has been a pleasure talking to you.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, and maybe to just tie it all together, with the biochemical approach you are not only getting rid of the metal but you are increasing your resistance to it. And so I talk about these three things you need, the glutathione, the transferase, and the transport proteins, and then I found a biochemistry paper that was a cell culture paper where they were finding cells – they had a big population of cells that they mutated to have different properties and they found one that was resistant to metals. And they found that it had these three things. And if they knocked out any one of those it stopped being resistant. And so there by ensuring that the biochemistry of the cell works properly that load of metal that is in that petri dish does not affect the cell. But when the cell biochemistry does not work properly that same load now becomes toxic. And so I want to get people away from thinking well, if I strip out the metals there will be no issue. Get your body to resist the metals and it will strip them out at the same time. Sometimes I think you have got to go in with a chelator. Lead I think does need some EDTA, but if you first fix the underlying system you are going to get vastly superior results.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Right, and as you say, to stay healthy and to do stuff that you really –

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Yeah, as opposed to waiting until that metal load gets high enough again to knock you out from running well. Like I said, if you can’t deal with our detox it is probably because you have got Lyme and now all of a sudden you see because we turned up your immune system and you are reacting to the Lyme – now, go fight the Lyme.

[Damien Blenkinsopp]: Yup, I have been there. Well, thanks again, Chris.

[Dr. Chris Shade]: Right, thank you very much again, Damien.