[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.