The Dr. Hyman Show - Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Ask Mark Anything: Heavy Metal Toxicity

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

My team and I are excited to introduce our revolutionary new platform, Dr. Hyman+, which offers premium content, perks, and information available exclusively for Dr. Hyman+ members.  In this teaser episode you’ll hear a preview of our second Dr. Hyman+ AMA where I discuss heavy metal toxicity. To gain access to the full episode, head over to https://drhyman.com/plus/. With your yearly membership to Dr. Hyman+, you’ll gain access to: Ad-Free Doctor’s Farmacy Podcast episodes Access to all my docu-series, including Broken Brain 1, Broken Brain 2, Longevity Roadmap + bonus material Exclusive monthly Functional Medicine Deep Dives Monthly Ask Mark Anything by you and only for you

Hey, podcast community. It's Dr. Mark here, and I'm so excited to introduce a revolutionary new platform my team and I've been working on. It's called Dr. Hyman Plus, and it's a premium membership exclusive for my community. With Dr. Hyman Plus, you get a ton of private content and special access that nobody else gets. Now, the yearly membership gives you exclusive access to ad-free Doctors Pharmacy podcast episodes, access to all of my docuseries, including the Longevity Roadmap and Broken Brain 1 and 2, plus all the bonus content. You get monthly functional medicine deep dives where one of our doctors goes deep into a health topic to tell you everything you need to know. You also get access to my monthly Ask Mark Anything Q&A where I answer the Dr. Hyman Plus community's biggest health and wellness questions. And this Q&A is only accessible with a membership.

Because I'm so excited to share this platform with you, I'm releasing a teaser of my brand new Ask Dr. Mark Anything episode. And I hope you enjoy it. And I hope you head over to drhyman.com forward slash plus that's drhyman.com slash PLUS for more information. Okay, here we go. Hey, everyone, and thank you so much for tuning in to the second ever episode of Dr. Hyman Plus exclusive Ask Mark Anything. My name is Darcy and I'm one of the producers of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries. Ask Mark Anything exclusive for Dr. Hyman Plus is an episode where we collect all of your deep questions to be answered by our expert, Dr. Mark Hyman. This is something that is only available exclusively to the Dr. Hyman Plus community. We've collected some of your top questions for Dr. Hyman in this special Ask

Mark Anything, and we're excited to get the answers from the doctor himself. So without further ado, let's get started with the first question. All right, Dr. Hyman. So something, there's this topic. Hi, everybody. Hi, Darcy. Hi. Awesome. So there's this question that's really prevalent in the functional community, but it seems to be kind of ignored a little bit in the conventional community. And it's all about this topic of heavy metals. And essentially, the role that heavy metals have in impacting our health and like exactly where they come from, and really like how much they affect us. And so the first topic is essentially how do you approach heavy metal toxicity in your practice? But of course, with that, if you could just kind of talk a little bit about what the exact issue is with heavy metals, where you get them from, how you test for them and things like that.

So unfortunately, I'm an expert in this topic. I wish I wasn't. Because when I was 34, I lived in China for a year and got mercury poisoning and I didn't know it, but it led to just total collapse of every single one of my body systems. And it really led me to the discovery of functional medicine, to healing myself and to understanding the role of environmental toxins, particularly heavy metals like mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, and others in our health and disease. And I think when I went to medical school, we learned about acute toxicity.

In other words, if it was something you got acute exposure to, you can get poisoned. But other than that, it wasn't really an issue. And what's really striking for me is that when I began to learn about this, I discovered a whole world of science that has just been completely ignored by traditional medicine. Most physicians learn, again, about acute toxicology in medical school, but don't learn about chronic low-level exposures and how those impact our health. And it's interesting to look at the history of this,

particularly in terms of heavy metals. The thing that has actually caught attention and actually become part of mainstream medicine is lead poisoning or lead toxicity in children. And so most pediatricians know to check levels of lead in their patients to see if they're exposed to lead paint or if they live in industrial areas to lead that comes from cement plants or coal burning factories. And they've been able to test for that. And there is even FDA approved treatment for chelation using DMSA for these children who have high levels of lead. What we've learned over time is that there is no safe level. So when you look at your blood test, if you get a blood sugar, there is a normal level of blood sugar. Let's say 70 to 90 is your optimal level.

If it's over that, you're at risk. If it's low, it's not good. What's the normal level of blood level of mercury or lead? Zero, like zero. There should have no heavy metals in your body. It's not part of your biological requirements requirements and there is no really safe level. If you look at the data, we used to say a level of 40, for example, of lead was normal. Then it was 20. Then it was 10. And studies have shown even down to a level of one, we see significant neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental effects

on children. So even at very low, low, low, low, low levels, there is significant toxicity. And in lead particularly, they discovered this by looking at the dental lead, by measuring lead in kids' teeth and seeing how it correlated with behavioral issues, attention issues, learning and academic issues. This is really quite significant. And these lead poisoned kids really struggle. They have academic performance issues. They have behavioral issues. They're violent, aggressive.

And so this has really become part of mainstream medicine. And I have no idea why they've ignored the other metals. And I also don't think that we really think about how to appropriately test for these things. And we'll talk about the testing. So lead toxicity is common. It's actually not as common these days as mercury toxicity, because we've gotten lead out of paint, we've gotten lead out of gasoline. But if you live near an industrial area, if you live in an urban environment, if you live in a developing country country where they don't deal with the emission controls from factories, you can be exposed to quite a lot of lead from these coal-burning power plants or cement plants that are producing huge amounts of these effluents in the air.

Mercury is the other one that is really important. And I discovered this through my own challenges with mercury poisoning. And I lived in China and I was told I should clean out my air filter every day and have an air filter in my apartment because it was so polluted. And of course I did that, but I was stupid.

And I didn't realize that I probably shouldn't wear a filtered mask in order to clean the air filter. Or if I banged it out over the balcony, it would just, all this black soot would come out. And it was just concentrated pollution. And in China and Beijing at that time, they were 10 million people heating their homes with raw coal. That was what they used. And that coal has tons of metals in it. And that was getting out into the air, into the filter, and then right into my system. And so I personally was pretty strong and healthy. But after I came back from China, I

all of a sudden had total system collapse. I ended up having a digestive thing. I don't know what it was. I must have gotten food poisoning or something. But it just sort of was the tipping point. And my entire system collapsed into total breakdown. I developed severe gut issues and digestive problems and diarrhea for years. I developed autoimmune symptoms and autoimmune abnormalities and tests. I felt rashes everywhere. My tongue was swollen. I couldn't eat anything without being totally bloated. I had raccoon eyes just every time I ate food.

I would have severe exhaustion and fatigue and cognitive dysfunction. I couldn't sleep. My muscles were being damaged. Something called CPK, which is a muscle enzyme, was really high, indicating that my body was essentially eating itself. The muscles were being damaged. I really was a mess. My immune system, my energy system, my detox system, my gut, my hormones, my adrenals, my gut, my hormones, my adrenals, my thyroid, my sleep, everything just totally screwed up. And so I began to understand on a really personal basis just how nasty these metals are and what they do across a wide range of biological systems. So if you look up the symptoms of mercury poisoning or lead poisoning, they can

be a wide ranging set of things, everything from depression to autoimmune disease to Alzheimer's to cancer to diabetes. Arsenic has been linked to diabetes in many countries. And arsenic in the drinking water, for example, in India is very common, and they have high rates of diabetes. They throw all the batteries and all the kind of waste products from technology into the rivers and here in in the dumps and it gets into the water supply. So we really, our environment is just loaded with tons of heavy metals in ways that we really hadn't before the industrial revolution. I mean, there was a volcano that erupted and there was mercury deposited or lead. But now, you know, if you, for example, in Seattle, you can actually increase your mercury levels simply by living in Seattle, not because there's mercury in Seattle,

but because China releases so much mercury from coal burning that it goes into the atmosphere, floats across the Pacific Ocean, and ends up in Seattle. So we really have a pandemic of low-grade heavy metal toxicity from lead and mercury. And I've seen this cause everything from, like I said, Alzheimer's to autism, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, heart failure. I mean, I'll just share some of the stories and then we'll talk about what to do, how to diagnose it. But, you know, it can be anything from a patient, for example, who had heart failure for no reason. And when we did a mercury test, it was just off the chart. And then, you know, when I started looking at the literature, there was an article in the American

Journal of Cardiology that found that if you looked at what we call idiopathic cardiomyopathy which means you have heart failure but you don't know why you can't identify the cause not from a heart attack or high blood pressure or something or a virus or something else because we don't know and in those cases when they did muscle biopsies there was 22 000 22 000 times the amount of mercury as the control group who didn't have uh who had a had a known cause for heart failure. I think there was like 12,000 times the amount of arsenic. So we basically got rid of her mercury and chelated her and her heart failure was fixed and she's doing great. And now heart failure just doesn't reverse. You just don't get that unless you get a heart transplant, you can manage it

with medications. Another patient I had who had ulcerative colitis, and I did all the normal functional medicine stuff. It just wasn't getting better. This was years ago. It turned out he had very high heavy metal poisoning and mercury levels, and we chelated the mercury out, and his colitis went away. I've had a patient with Alzheimer's who was living in Pittsburgh, which is where they had the steel plants and they put coal ash on everything, which is full of mercury. He was severely mercury toxic and had Alzheimer's. And by getting rid of the metals from his system, he was able to improve his memory and mood and function and was able to go back to work. So we see case after case of these. The other

thing to note is it's not just a direct poison, but it's also an immunotoxin. And there's a whole field of research called autogens. Autogens are toxins that cause autoimmunity. And so when anybody has any kind of autoimmune issue, neurologic issue, anything that really is a source of disease, it's really important. And I think from a functional medicine perspective, you know, dealing with people's gut, addressing, addressing heavy metals, you know, and gluten, those are really big, big wins and why we have so much success because we go for the root causes. So you can have a myriad of symptoms. It can cause insomnia, anxiety, depression.

Another patient had been depressed for years, was struggling. And again, had heavy metals. We got rid of them and she got better. Another woman was a trainer and worked out all the time and ate a great diet. And she was 40 pounds overweight and nothing she could do. We know that heavy metals can interfere with metabolism. These are called obesogens. So it can cause a wide array of all sorts of symptoms. So anybody comes in my office with any real chronic disease, it's one of the first things I think about. And I want to test and I almost check it like a blood pressure for most people if I have any suspicion that there might be an issue. And the problem with traditional medicine is that, you know, we just do regular blood

work. We all check your blood work. And if you're mercury or lead or arsenic or high in your blood, okay, we'll look at it. Oh, it's how you eat less fish or, you know, try to identify the source. But the problem with those blood tests is one, they're really only indicating any current exposure. So let's say you ate a can of tuna fish every day or two cans of tuna fish every day for 10 years, and then you stopped for 10 years. Well, your blood level could be zero, but your body would have stored all that mercury from all that tuna over the decade that you ate the tuna. It just wouldn't show up in your blood test. And there's a funny

joke in medicine when we talk about functional medicine. So this guy drops his keys in the street and he's looking for them. And his friend sees him looking for his keys under this lamppost. He says, hey, what you doing? He says, well, I'm looking for my keys. He says, well, where'd you lose them? He says, well, I lost them down the street, but the light's better over here. So the problem is that we tend in medicine to look where we're used to looking.

And I even read an article on lead toxicity or mercury lead. I'm like, well, we're going to check the blood because that's what we can check. Well, that's not where the problem is. It's like, so for functional medicine doctors, we look at heavy metals in a multitude of ways. You can look at hair, blood, and urine.

You can even look at stool metals too. And the most, I think, effective test, and one that needs to be more scientifically validated, but I can tell you, I've done probably 20 or 30,000 of these tests over 30 years. I mean, just a lot of them. So I understand, you know, what they mean in the context years. I mean, just a lot of them. So I understand, you know, what they mean in the context of the overall population in terms of what's normal. We even did a survey of all these patients. So we found that over 40% had levels that were considered pretty significantly harmful of all the patients we screened were heavy metals. So that's

a high number of the population. Of course, it's people who are sick and coming to me, but I think it's really a big deal. So what we do to test for mercury, and my favorite test is I check blood for sure, because you want to see if people are having acute exposures. Two, you can check a urine. Doctors will do this. Doctors will check a 24-hour urine test.

But that only, again, will look at results from people who have had ongoing current exposure. So if you're working in a factory or a smel have had ongoing current exposure. So if you're working in a factory or a smelting plant and you want to see if you're toxic, okay, you can check the 24-hour urine. But if you haven't had exposures, it's going to be negative because what happens is the metals clear from your blood. Every 90 days, for example, the mercury just clears out from your blood, goes in your, you excrete some of it if you're good at excreting it, which I'm not, and half the population probably isn't good at getting rid of it.

And second, it causes all these challenges because you're not looking at the body stores. Because when you, for example, eat tuna, where's the mercury? It's in the meat. What's your meat? It's muscle. It's organs. It's brain, right? They, for example, have done studies on sheep where they'll put in dental fillings

and they'll go in and then do an autopsy later. And they'll find that their mercury in the brain is correlated directly with the amount of fillings they have in their mouth. Okay. So we understand that we're looking in the wrong place. And the best way to test, and I think it's imperfect, but the best way to test for now, for example, mercury, is using a challenge test. So it's where we take a chelating pill, a medication, usually DMSA, sometimes DMPS, and there's also EDTA for lead. And you basically give this to a person and have them collect the urine afterwards. What that'll do is it'll pull out the metals from any storage spots and that will allow you to see what the overall load is coming out in the urine.

And you know, it can, it should really be zero, but if it's anywhere under 10, it's probably okay. If it's over 20, it's getting high. If it's over a hundred, you're in big trouble. And mine was 187. So that's just to give you a perspective of how bad it was. And I think that this test, you know, I'd love to see validated through better methods, but I can tell you from the functional medicine community, this

is something that is real and we see a lot. The other thing we look at is we call the QS tri-test, which is a test that looks at hair, urine, and blood, and we can look at speciation of mercury. Not all mercury is the same. For example, you can have inorganic mercury, which comes from pollution or from fillings, or methylmercury, which is also known as organic mercury, which comes from fish. Now, all the mercury ultimately was inorganic to start with, and then it gets from coal and pollution, goes into the oceans, the fish, you know know eat the algae that's got the mercury in it and then the little fish get eaten by the bigger fish and the bigger fish getting by the even bigger fish and so by the time you get the tunas and sharks and you're in big trouble and so i think

the the the the this test is beautiful because one it tests uh whether where it's coming from if it's fillings or if it's pollution or if it's from fish. And two, it shows how your body excretes it. Are you good at getting rid of it in your urine or hair? And so that's a really, really helpful test. And so we can look at that as well. So that just looks at mercury, but the challenge test looks at all metals, arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium. And you can see, you know, people are smokers, their cadmium levels are high. Or people, you know, for example, are doing, you know,

things with lead. For example, drinking a lot of lead from crystal, leaded crystal wine glasses, leaded crystal, you know, serving dishes. I mean, these are often have lead in them. Glazed plates. I had a woman who was eating off these glazed plates from expensive plates from Europe, full of lead. So you have to be kind of a detective and listen to their lifestyle and what's going on. Well, I hope you enjoyed that teaser of exclusive content that you get every single month with Dr. Hyman Plus. If you want to listen to the full episode and get access to ad-free podcast episodes, plus all the content from my docuseries and, of course, any future ones we're going to release, plus monthly

Ask Mark Anything episodes, plus, that's what we call a plus, right? Plus monthly functional medicine deep dive episodes. I guess, right, that's why we call it Dr. Hyman Plus. Head over to drhyman.com forward slash plus. That's drhyman.com slash P-L-U-S to learn more. I'll see you there. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode.

Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner,

and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.