Chelation therapy to rid the body of heavy metals, e.g. lead and copper and aluminu

OB/GYN NP · Mar 4, 2005

Hi Just passing,

I am an NP, and work in an integrative medicine practice (we combine herbal/"non-conventional medicine" with traditional allopathic medicine), as well as in a hospital setting. Chelation therapy has been practiced for over 50 years in Europe, with great success. The problem is, there are no large-scale studies on its effectiveness, so its success has been largely anecdotal to this point. The NIH and Duke University are in the process of doing a large-scal national trial on the effectiveness of chelation therapy. If you'd like to read more about it, you can go to the National Institute of Health website, and search for TACT trial, or chelation therapy, and you can read about chelation. I was skeptical myself at first, because it was nothing that I had encountered in my traditional RN or NP training. But after having been diagnosed with mercury toxicity, which was leading to a myriad of neurological symptoms, and being treated with chelation therapy, changing nothing else in my lifestyle, and seeing my mercury levels drop dramatically, and my symptoms improve dramatically, and seeing this process repeated multiple times in my patients, I'm a firm believer.

The disease processes that benefit from chelation therapy are two, primarily. The first is heavy metal toxicity, as you mentioned in your post (heavy metal toxicity can occur for any number of reasons, but the most common is mercury, tin, and copper leeching out of metal fillings (especially broken ones) in your mouth, and also from contamination of food or water supply, etc). The second disease process that benefits from chelation therapy is heart disease. Chelation therapy is very useful in decreasing plaques on the walls of arteries, but especially beneficial in cardiac arteries. We have several patients who have used this therapy with astounding results, including one who had pre- and post-chelation therapy (a series of 15 treatments, once a week for 15 weeks) angiograms, showing a decrease of obstructions in every one of his coronary arteries by at least 50%, and in one coronary artery, by 70%.

If you or a family member are considering chelation therapy, I would just do some research on chelation, make sure you're comfortable with it, and try it. Many of our patients have some to us with no other option but bypass surgery, and their attitude is "what do I have to lose? If it saves me from undergoing surgery, it's worth a try." Make sure that you go through a reputable practitioner. You can find a reputable practitioner on the ACAM website (American College for the Advancement of Medicine). They usually have practitioner listings across the U.S.

Hope this helps! If you ahve any other questions, feel free to e-mail me privately. I'd be happy to help. :)

Jan

aluminum....
Are you all hearing of this being practiced much? Is this a standard therapy??
A common therapy??
Or a ""Health-nut"" kind of therapy ??
One doctor in this town, a ""Holistic Medicine "" M.D. is prescribing it
for a lot of patients. the patients say they feel better.
Any of you taking these treatments or have family members taking them??
I'd like to hear your opinions/ observations.
Just curious what kind of disease processes benefit from this.

Nurse Ratched, RN · Mar 4, 2005

My only knowledge of it is that a family at the adult day care I worked at would drag their elderly loved one off to "chelation therapy" (for her Alzheimer's dementia) and say they were getting the demons out. Horrible bruising from the IV's and she had to be held down apparently.

Straight to adult protective services.

Jayla · Mar 5, 2005

Not sure about aluminum.

In the case of very high blood levels in children (above 25 mcgs), lead can cause serious neurological damage among other problems. Medical treatment of high blood lead levels are chelating agents such as calcium disodium edetate or succimer. From what I understand, this is pretty standard practice.

UM Review RN, ASN, RN · Mar 5, 2005

One of the hardest IV sticks I ever had was for a patient who'd had chelation therapy. Couldn't believe how sclerosed and tough her veins were.