The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Tell If Mercury Toxicity Is The Cause Of Your Mysterious Symptoms with Dr. Elizabeth Boham

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If we have some variations or some snips in our genetics that can impact how much these heavy metals are impacting our health. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. With winter in full swing, I find myself searching for warm and nourishing meals that can fit pretty easily into my busy schedule. I love to cook, and this time of year, most of my go-to recipes are soups, broths, and stews. But sometimes I just don't have enough time to whip up something homemade. And that's why I love the bone broth from Kettle and Fire. Their broths are crafted by world-class chefs for incredible flavor and quality.

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Starting point is 00:01:58 Unfortunately, most meat and seafood at the grocery store is not really serving our health. Conventional based animals have higher levels of inflammatory fats, not to mention antibiotics, hormones, and other harmful compounds we just should not eat. And the seafood can be full of heavy metals and other toxins or just lacking nutrients in general. Don't even get me started on the environmental and inhumane aspects of conventional meat and seafood production either. That's another huge issue that we can improve by shopping more consciously. And that is why I love ButcherBox. They make it super easy to get humanely raised meat that you can trust by delivering it right to your doorstep. ButcherBox has everything you could want, like

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Starting point is 00:03:20 Pharmacy. Hey everybody, welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy with an F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you've ever felt heavy, this is a conversation you should listen to. And I'm not talking about heavy sad, I'm talking about heavy metals, which are a rampant problem, far underdiagnosed, underappreciated, pretty much almost ignored by traditional medicine, and yet is driving so many of our health crises. And today I'm so happy to be sharing the story of mercury with you, and it's a very personal

Starting point is 00:03:57 story for me, with my colleague and medical director on this very special episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy called House Call. And I'm going to sit down with so many of my colleagues at the Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. And Liz is just my number one doc. She's the medical director of the Ultra Wellness Center. She teaches all over the world. She's on the faculty Institute for Functional Medicine. She's one of the best doctors I know. And we are going to talk about mercury. So welcome, Liz. Thanks, Mark. It's great to be with you today.

Starting point is 00:04:27 So let's start with talking about why do you think this is just so ignored? Because mercury is such a prevalent problem. And when we test people at the Ultra Wellness Center, we find so many people have not only high blood levels of mercury, but high total body levels. In fact, we did a survey of the 10,000 tests that we'd done at some point in time. And we looked at the number of people who had toxicity. And it was 40% of the people who came to the Ultra Wellness Center had high levels of mercury that interfere with their biology.

Starting point is 00:05:06 So why do you think this is just so ignored? And what do we have to do to properly discover whether mercury is an issue for somebody or not? I mean, it's a great question, Mark. You know, even the World Health Organization recognizes that mercury is one of the top 10 chemicals of major public health concern. But I think that toxins in general in conventional medicine are often overlooked and ignored. And because we always are thinking about acute toxicity in conventional medicine, and so often we're not thinking about the chronic lower levels of toxicity that can have huge health effects as well.

Starting point is 00:05:47 I think the other reason that sometimes it's ignored is we're often not doing personalized medicine in how we were trained conventionally, where heavy metals, as with any toxin, impact different people differently depending on their toxic load, all of the other toxins they have exposure to, how their body detoxifies, how their digestive system is working, how old they are. Right. We know that younger kids are impacted more than old, you know, some older people. So many things impact how we're impacted by these heavy metals, our genetics, our microbiome. And so I think that sometimes we look at the whole population and say, oh, our mercury levels are coming down in the environment, or we're working to have them come down,

Starting point is 00:06:44 but not take that individual person, which can be really impacted by this. Well, you know, it is one of the most important drivers of chronic disease. And it's also one of the most ignored. And I, I unfortunately had a very personal experience with this because I lived in China and was exposed to huge amounts of the pollution. They burned coal, raw coal for 10 million people in the city. The air was black. I had an air filter. I would clean it out all the time and sucking in all this concentrated mercury. And when I got back to the States,

Starting point is 00:07:14 the mercury caught up with me and it ended up causing total collapse of my system. So I got chronic fatigue syndrome. I developed autoimmune disease. My gut stopped working. I had diarrhea for years and years. I had severe cognitive dysfunction. I couldn't focus. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't remember anything. It was like I had dementia, ADD, and depression all at once.

Starting point is 00:07:34 And I also developed severe muscle injury. My muscles were being eaten up and damaged. The mitochondria were being damaged. I developed rashes and sores. My immune system completely screwed up. My hormones screwed up. My thyroid, my adrenal. So everything screwed up because of the mercury. And I tended to have a really high level. And I went to doctor after doctor after doctor and no one could help me. I went to Harvard. I went to Columbia. You know, all the top, top doctors and no one really

Starting point is 00:08:00 could figure out what's going on until I met a naturopath in Maui, actually, over 23 years ago, who said, you know, maybe we should test you for things. And he said, but maybe you have heavy metals. And I was like, yeah, yeah, whatever. And I tested it and I had one of the highest levels I've seen. You know, Liz and I test people all the time and my level was 187, which is, you know, really high. And, you know, anything over 20 is bad on a challenge test. So I know personally how bad mercury can be. And I can tell you over practicing functional medicine for almost 30 years, it is one of those incredible things that if you find it and it's

Starting point is 00:08:38 the cause of a person's disease and you treat it, and we'll talk about how to treat it in a minute, it literally can transform their lives. So I went from being someone who was probably going to be on disability my entire life with chronic fatigue syndrome to being super healthy and fit at 61 and going strong. So I think it's important to understand that if you have some weird ailment and you're not getting better and you've tried everything, it's important to look for heavy metals. Yeah. I mean, they say, I mean, we know that heavy metals, mercury can impact the nervous system, the digestive system, our development, definitely our development. So kids, as I said earlier, are impacted more because they're young and small humans. So they get impacted by the toxic load in the environment.

Starting point is 00:09:27 So that can really impact their development. It can result in memory issues for young and old, how we learn and understand our coordination. It can impact the immune system. It's associated with autoimmune diseases and immunosuppression, mood issues, sleep issues, right? Memory issues, changes in our kidney function and other function in the body. And like you mentioned, we often see it snowball like that, right? Where you just, the body just

Starting point is 00:09:58 sort of snowballs and gets worse and worse with multiple different things going on. Yeah, it's so true. And I think we know that mercury is the second most dangerous toxin on the planet after plutonium. And it's prevalent in our food and fish, in our mouth and fillings it's prevalent often in medication thimerosal which is a preservative it comes from coal emissions and power plants if you live near a cement plant or a coal plant you're going to get the pollution of mercury it it's really prevalent and it's a potent neurotoxin it's it's the most potent neurotoxin out there. It's an immunotoxin, meaning it can cause autoimmune diseases and all kinds of other issues. And like you said, it creates this cascade of problems that seem often vague, like developmental issues in kids, even autism.

Starting point is 00:10:56 That's not to say all autism is caused by mercury, because autism, there's no such thing as autism. There are autisms, and every kid with autism is a little bit different, has different causes and treatments. But I've definitely seen heavy metals be a factor and i think you know even even weight metabolism uh people think that you know you're you're you know how could mercury like you're mentioning right yeah so we know that there's a real link between environmental toxins and obesity we call these obesogens and heavy metals are certainly one. I remember a very young fitness trainer who was like 40 pounds overweight and no matter what she ate or what she did, she would not lose the weight. And we found out she had

Starting point is 00:11:35 really high levels of mercury. We chelated her, detoxified her, and we'll talk about how to do that in a minute. And we found that she was able to really drop the weight very quickly. What's even more frightening, you know, and I think this is sort of, I don't know if I can get the exact stat. You maybe remember it, but they measured the blood levels of mercury in pregnant women. This was in JAMA a number of years ago. And they found that I think it was like one in eight births were from women who had toxic levels of mercury in their blood, which was going to the fetus. Right.

Starting point is 00:12:09 I know I was just looking at the EPA website and they were they mentioned on EPA.gov. They said that more than 75,000 newborns in the U.S. each year are estimated to have potential for developmental delays and learning disabilities because of mercury. And where are they getting it? Right. And that's, that's, that's, you know, that's a conservative estimate, right? That's a conservative estimate. Yeah. I think it's more than that, more than that, but that's a lot. That's a lot. So the, you know, when you're a fetus, you're getting it through the placenta, you know, through from the mother. So the mother eats high mercury fish or they have exposure through the environment or even their mercury amalgams.

Starting point is 00:12:57 Right. And then that can get into the developing fetus through the placenta. Unfortunately, also, you know, when we're breastfeeding, we can share toxins with our newborn. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be breastfeeding, but you know, that that does impact the baby. Yeah. So I think that's right. And the data I think was from JAMA was from 2003, that 8% of women had concentrations higher than the epa's protection recommended amount which is 5.8 which is still too high right right and and so zero is the normal level like what's the normal level of mercury in your blood zero zero and there is a

Starting point is 00:13:37 normal blood sugar there's normal cholesterol but there is no normal level of mercury so when it says zero to ten on the lab and 10 is normal, that is just nonsense because there's an increasing risk with increasing exposures. And where is it coming from that we see so much mercury? Where are the main sources and how do people reduce their exposures? Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest source is coal burning facilities. So, and mercury is emitted during that coal burning process. It goes into the air and then it gets, then that goes into our water supply. And then the, the mercury then settles at the bottom of our lakes and rivers and oceans and bacteria then consume it and produce this

Starting point is 00:14:19 methylmercury, which is a really toxic form of mercury for people. And then it bioaccumulates in the fish. So, you know, little fish might have a little bit of mercury, but then the bigger fish eat the littler fish and then the bigger, bigger fish eat the medium-sized fish, right? And so the bigger the fish is, the more mercury accumulates, bioaccumulates into the fish. And so that's why the recommendation is to stick with the smaller fish when you're eating fish. And so, you know, the larger the fish, the shark, the tuna, the king mackerel, you know, you're going to get way more mercury when you eat those larger fish. And so you want to be avoiding those large fish. I think that's right.

Starting point is 00:15:11 And I think the major source is fish consumption. However, the FDA, after decades and decades of evidence showing the dangers of mercury fillings, we call them silver fillings, but they're not silver, they're actually mostly mercury, has ruled that children and pregnant women should not be having mercury fillings. Now, in most other countries, in Europe and in Canada, they've basically already done that for years and years and years. But finally, the FDA this year put out a statement that we should not be putting mercury fillings in kids or in pregnant women. And conversely, even if you have them, they're not saying taking them out. But if you have them, they do off gas, they do vaporize, and you do absorb

Starting point is 00:15:58 the inorganic mercury. And we actually can test for this. And we can tell whether you have mercury from fish or mercury from fillings. So it's important to understand that that it's it's it's not a benign thing to have mercury fillings and it's a little scary for people because they're like what do i do i got a mouthful of fillings you don't want to just go rip them out because you can get worse in fact i had a friend who was a doctor who was just he should have known better but he went and had all mercury take it out of his mouth and he didn't do it safely ended up causing a massive flood of mercury in his system caused heart failure and we know we know that you know heart failure can be linked to mercury in fact one study i read years ago looking at what we call idiopathic heart failure means we don't know the cause

Starting point is 00:16:34 when they did muscle biopsies they found there were like 22 000 times the level of mercury in the muscle compared to people who didn't have heart failure when they did a biopsy and also arsenic and lead and other things and And I've had patients with heart failure who I've literally chelated and treated who reversed their heart failure, improved their ejection fraction, which is a measure of how much blood your heart can pump out by simply removing the metals. So I was just going to say, like you said, in this past September, the FDA came out with this recommendation to not use these silver fillings or silver amalgams, which contain 40 to 50 percent mercury in them. Just, you know, that's a that's a that's a lot. And they still do. People come to me every day and they're like, do they still have mercury in those silver fillings? I'm like, they still do. You know, and they're still using them because they're cheap and they're very strong. They last a long time.

Starting point is 00:17:29 But they said, the FDA said, not for women, women who are at childbearing age, who want to become pregnant, who are planning to become pregnant, who are nursing children less than six, but also for people who have any neurological conditions or kidney function issues. So in reality, really, who who should we be for? Right. Right.

Starting point is 00:17:51 Yeah. And I remember I was right. I mean, if it's not safe for pregnant women and children, why is it OK for the rest of us? Exactly. I remember this. You know, I told this story before, but I remember, you know, when I first started working with you and you would look at my mouth and I was full of amalgams and you would be like, Liz, you got to get those out. And I'd be like, really? You think so? Are you sure? And then I did that test that can delineate and say, is this mercury coming from eating too much high mercury fish or is it coming from these amalgams and the test showed that i was still that those amalgams were still emitting enough mercury vapor that that was then getting out in my system and so it was showing up in the test and then it sort of convinced me

Starting point is 00:18:35 okay not that i didn't believe you i was i was listening to you mark no no it's okay i mean who wants to go to the dentist it's not like oh let's go to the dentist. No. And so, but you're right. It has to be done safely, right? You want to have it. You want to work with a dentist who knows what they're doing, who uses a dam in your mouth so it doesn't get into your mouth, puts you on oxygen, you know, really has a- High speed suction. Yes. So that it's safe for you and safe for the dentist, too. Right. And they should be wearing a gas mask, too. Yeah. And, you know, we also we'll talk about this with our cases.

Starting point is 00:19:13 It's really important that you're in a you're in a healthy place. If you are thinking about getting them removed, not only do you want to work with somebody who knows how to do it safely, but you want your body to be healthy, to be having your digestive system working well, to be having good bowel movements, to be sweating regularly, to be eating a really good healthy diet. Because even though they do it as safely as possible, this is a major procedure and you want to make sure the body can handle that removal and replacement with some composite filling. Yeah. So let's talk about in a minute, the ways in which we treat people that it's different. And before we get into that, we're going to go through some

Starting point is 00:19:56 cases. I want to talk about how we identify the problem because, you know, often I read this one paper on mercury that was hysterical to me because it was like, well, we measured the blood level because that's the easiest place to test the mercury. It reminds me of the joke of the guy who was looking for his keys under the lamppost and ended up being asked by his friend, what are you doing? He said, well, I'm looking for my keys. Where did you drop them? I said, well, I dropped them down the road. He said, why are you looking over here? says well the light's better here meaning we're used to doing tests for things that we can test not necessarily where the problem is and so let's

Starting point is 00:20:31 talk about how we diagnose someone when someone comes in with autoimmune issues neurologic issues developmental issues digestive whatever chronic fatigue issues we really check almost everybody for me it's almost like getting a blood pressure on a person. It's a basic test to see if we want to screen people for heavy metals, what's really going on. So how do we begin to think about testing and what are the sort of different types of tests, blood, urine, and so forth here that we can look at and what do they each mean and how do we come up with a coherent assessment of someone's total body burden of heavy metals and mercury? I mean, I always start with a good history. I mean, I think that's important to, you know, get a sense of somebody's environmental history. What's their toxic exposure over the lifetime? How much high mercury fish are they eating? How much did

Starting point is 00:21:21 they eat in the past? You know, do they, do they love tuna and they have, you know, sushi from tuna or or how many silver fillings do they have in their mouth? How old are they? When were those silver fillings placed? Because that, you know, they do over years and years, they they emit less mercury. So, you know, and then, of course, you want to know what's what is their health issues? What are they what are they dealing with? It's really important to take a really good, careful, detailed history. And then it helps us determine if, if evaluation for mercury makes sense to do. So then we look at, you know, you can look at blood levels, but like you mentioned, sometimes blood levels don't give us all of the information. And so we'll often do the Quicksilver Tri-Test, which is a great test that we had talked about

Starting point is 00:22:09 before that looks at blood, urine, and hair. And it tells us about methylmercury and inorganic mercury, the inorganic more likely coming from your silver amalgams. And that can help us determine, you know, should these amalgams be safely replaced when that person's body is ready to have that process done? So that's a test I like, and it really helps me get a sense. We can also- So wait, before you go on to the next test, the blood test is important to understand because if you have a blood test, it's what your doctor will typically do. So I think I have mercury

Starting point is 00:22:41 issues. Well, let me check your blood. So they check the blood and it's zero but you've been eating tuna when you were in college three times a day for 10 years then you stopped well if if you've eaten no fish over the last 90 days or 120 days your blood levels are going to be pretty negligible or zero but you could have accumulated huge amounts of mercury the other thing is with silver fillings or amalgam fillings mercury fillings you might not have a very high blood level because it's in smaller doses but it's extremely toxic and so you often will miss it so so just because your blood level is normal does not mean you do not have a problem with mercury. And that's why we look at, for example, the QS tri-test where we measure urine, hair, and blood, your detoxification of

Starting point is 00:23:29 the metals, as well as whether it's coming from fish or fillings or pollution. But the most important test is the one you're about to tell us about, which really tells us, and it's the best approximation we have now, I don't think it's a perfect test, what our total body load is and how much we've accumulated over our lifetime. So what is that test? And tell us about the pros and cons and the challenges and the controversies about it. Absolutely. So, you know, what you're speaking about is the urine toxic metal test, which is a provoked

Starting point is 00:23:57 heavy metal challenge test where we collect somebody's urine first thing in the morning and then we give them a chelator. Now, we are typically using DMSA. There are other chelators you can use for this test, but at our practice, we often use oral DMSA. And then they take the chelator, which binds to the heavy metals in the body, and then we collect their urine for like six hours, and then we get a sense of past exposure. There, there is a lot of controversy about this test. And, you know, it is something that I talk to every patient about if we're even thinking about doing the test, because they have to understand the pros and cons, as you mentioned. And there's no really standard norm for what your provoked challenge should be.

Starting point is 00:24:47 And one of the reasons for that is that a lot of different clinicians do it differently. So, you know, one clinician may use a different chelator or they might do it IV or they might do it for a different amount of time or a different dose. And so that's one reason that, you know, you have to make sure you're comparing apples to apples. And so the companies often don't give you a reference range for what is normal. So nobody's come up with what is what is normal. Well, normal is zero, Liz. I mean, normal is zero.

Starting point is 00:25:20 We should not have mercury in our bodies. We should not have lead or arsenic or cadmium. The level is zero. So the question is is what above zero is a problem and i've seen people for example have had very high levels but their bodies seem to attest accommodate to it and i personally had mercury for years without being sick so i had like two or three years when i came back from china maybe probably two years where i was okay but then something happened it tipped me over and everything just fell apart so i think you know you can't really just assume that any level is good. And you have to assume that if people are sick, that it's really worth getting it out, or people are at risk for diseases, or if you're at risk for autoimmune disease, you're at risk for diabetes, you're at risk for dementia, then it's really important proactively to address heavy

Starting point is 00:26:01 metals. And it's, you know, that test and some other tests that we can talk about help us sort of stratify what group somebody is in, right? Like, are they in a group where we just need to work on general good, healthy detoxification, eating a good, healthy diet that's rich in phytonutrients, making sure you're eating a lot of fiber just to help the body detoxify, right? Or maybe this person needs to be a little more aggressive, or maybe they need to be doing a chelation-type protocol. So, it's really important to look at all the different tests. We also look at their genetics and how they produce glutathione, how they detoxify. We can look at markers like oxidative stress that can give us a sense of how much these heavy metals

Starting point is 00:26:50 have caused illness in their body. And of course, we look at their symptoms. With autoimmunity, we can also look at antibodies against heavy metals or toxins. And that can sometimes give us a sense of, are those heavy metals creating or maybe part of the trigger for an autoimmune process going on in that person's body. So there's a lot of things we look at when we're sort of, when we're working to stratify how aggressive our treatment approach needs to be. Yeah. And the important thing is people realize

Starting point is 00:27:22 is that, you know, if you do have heavy metals, you cannot just go in and start ripping out your fillings or start chelating or doing other things. You have to really get ready for it because it's a big strain on the body. And if you don't do it right, you can make people sick. And, you know, we learned years ago in functional medicine that we need to follow a couple of steps. One, we need to mobilize the metals, which often is using chelators, whether they're natural chelators or medication chelators like DMSA, which pull the metal out of the cells and storage tissues. Then we need to increase circulation and transport to the liver and kidneys. So lots of fluids, exercise, lymphatic circulation, all really, really important. And then we need to upregulate all the pathways in the liver that start to immobilize the mercury, which involves

Starting point is 00:28:02 boosting glutathione. And we're going to talk about how to do that, which is almost like the sticky flypaper that the metals bind to, and then you get rid of it. And then we need to make sure it's getting out of the body. So you need to poop and pee and sweat. Saunas are very helpful. And there's a whole science to doing this correctly, which is important because if you do it incorrectly, you can really cause trouble. So let's talk about some cases because I think, you know, they'll be really illustrative. I can share my case a little bit, but I think I'd love to hear, you know, from you about that 40 year old woman who's always getting sick and always getting infections and always got sick after she traveled. So what, what, what clued

Starting point is 00:28:39 you into that? She might have metals and what did you find and what did you do? Right. So, so like you said, she was in her 40s and she came to see me about three years ago. And she picked up every virus that was going around, every stomach infection, every cold her kids brought home. She was always getting sick. She was that way when she was a kid, too. She got lots of ear infections. She was on lots of antibiotics.

Starting point is 00:29:03 She got strep throat all the time. And she came in frustrated with the fact that she was always getting sick. And when we did a full history and I did a physical exam, I saw that she had multiple silver fillings in her mouth. She had had lots of cavities as a kid. They were quickly filled with silver amalgams. I think she had 12 silver amalgams in her mouth that were placed when she was a kid. And so, she was also wondering, were these something she should have replaced? And I was too. I was wondering how much those amalgams were impacting her immune system, because as we talked about, heavy metals and mercury definitely can stress out the immune system. They can make the immune system not work as well. And they can also make the immune system make mistakes and fight itself like an autoimmune condition.

Starting point is 00:30:02 So they're they're tied in with both ends of the immune system not working as it should yeah and it can increase allergies and so forth right absolutely right right like reacting to everything um absolutely so you know when i when i was sick i i basically turkey broccoli and brown rice for like six months because i'd eat anything and my tongue would swell up my eyes would get all swollen i'd get raccoon eyes my skin would get rashes i mean it was it was horrible you're reacting to everything everything now i can eat anything it's like i repaired my system so that's the beauty of this is that when you use the science of functional medicine which we do at the Ultra Wellness Center, which we really filter everything through the lens of functional medicine, we're able to help people where no one else can be helped.

Starting point is 00:30:51 And I'm a perfect example of that. My life would have been totally different if I hadn't discovered functional medicine, if I hadn't found out I had mercury, if I hadn't learned about how to detoxify from it and learn how to use this in all my patients. So basically you found this woman, she had a high organic, inorganic mercury from her fillings. And so tell us what you did to help her heal and boost her immune function. Yeah. So she also had a lot of digestive issues, you know, acne, a lot of bloating after she ate. I mean, she was on lots of antibiotics as a kid.

Starting point is 00:31:22 So she, you know, she had a bunch of different things going on. We did do that test that looked at, could this mercury be coming from her fish or the air or how much was coming from her amalgams? And it definitely showed that there was some concern about the amalgams, the silver fillings. And so we wanted to help her get those out safely. She found a biological dentist who could do that for her. But in the process, we also wanted to support her body so that she would handle that process of getting them removed. So we added things like glutathione, like you said, talked about that, you know, the sticky molecule, it's the master detoxifier in the body and is really necessary for the body to remove toxins and heavy metals. We really made sure her diet was rich in fiber

Starting point is 00:32:13 because that's important. We made sure her diet was rich in those cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale that helps the body produce glutathione. We gave her some NAC, N-acetylcysteine, which is a precursor to glutathione. We made sure she was getting enough protein in her diet because protein is really important for detoxification. And then she slowly had her amalgams replaced. She did, I think it was three different sessions she went in for. And before and after each session, we gave her even a little more support through some of her supplements. And then for a while afterwards, we put her on a whole protocol that includes a binder, you know, to help with binding the toxins, liposomal glutathione, which is a glutathione that comes through the skin, through the oral mucosa, through the mouth, and different nutrients

Starting point is 00:33:10 to support that detoxification process. And she did that for three to six months. And when we rechecked her, her mercury levels were much lower. And the great thing is that she really started to feel better in terms of her immune system. She didn't get sick as much, you know, she, she didn't get every cold and flew around. She was kind of amazed at how well her immune system was working. And, you know, this, I just spoke to her recently. So she was thrilled because, you know, with COVID going around, she, she was, she was feeling so much more comfortable with how well her immune system was working. She felt like she had a really good control over not getting

Starting point is 00:33:48 every single virus going around. That's so great. So basically what you describe is identifying a high level of metals that are coming from her filling. She got them safely removed. And then you went through a very methodical process of supporting her body's own detox system. And, you know, one of the things we do is use food as medicine. And, you know, people don't understand how powerful food is in helping detoxification. And personally, when I go to the grocery store, I'm looking for drugs. I'm looking for the drugs in food that help upregulate the pathways in my own body that I know I need to boost detoxification.

Starting point is 00:34:26 In the next case, we're going to talk about some of the genetics involved in impaired detoxification. But for me, I have really crappy detox genes. So I'm not great at making glutathione. So I always make sure I eat plenty of cruciferous vegetables every day, two, three cups of broccoli, collards, kale, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, whatever I can get my hands on, I make sure that's a staple of my diet. And I also make sure that I'm eating things like garlic and onions. I'm using things like artichoke hearts and artichokes, which are great detoxifiers and many other phytochemicals, rosemary, lime, lemon peel, and many, many things we used every day to help us boost our own pathways. But, you know, in a very sophisticated way in functional medicine, we understand how to turn on all the super high ways of detoxification

Starting point is 00:35:12 using food, using amino acids, which are from protein. And you didn't mention this, but protein is super important for detoxification because a lot of the pathways involve amino acids. Also need the right B vitamins to methylate and get rid of the metals. We also need certain nutrients like selenium and zinc to help us boost our detox system. And of course, what you mentioned also is very important. It's not just taking all these things to rev up the detox process, but also to make sure we're getting rid of it, which means we need binders in the gut, things like silica or alginates and other binders, pectins, which can help to bind the metals so you don't reabsorb them

Starting point is 00:35:45 and you get rid of them from your body. And what happens is just striking. I'm just going to kind of quickly do a few stories and then I want to hear about this last case. But I've seen not only myself, but I've seen patients, for example, with autoimmune diseases like ulcerative colitis that I tried all my normal tricks on in functional medicine. Nothing worked. We got rid of the metals.

Starting point is 00:36:03 They got better. Crohn's disease. I've seen people with heart failure, reverse their heart failure, getting rid of heavy metals. I've seen people who have dementia, and you're going to talk about that, and memory issues are getting better. I've seen kids with autism improve. I've seen, you know, people lose weight in ways they couldn't lose weight. I've seen depression go away, insomnia, chronic fatigue. I mean, all these problems which are really difficult to treat using traditional medicine

Starting point is 00:36:25 often become quite simple when you actually identify the root cause. And that's what functional medicine is about. It's looking at the root causes. It's getting rid of the things that are causing the problem, like metals in this case, and providing all the things the body needs to function better. And that's why we call it functional medicine, because it's about how do you get to optimal function. And I just, I love the next case because, you know,

Starting point is 00:36:46 we're seeing basically an epidemic of dementia. You know, we have 5 million people now, soon be 14 million. There's so many with memory loss. You know, by the time you're 85, you have a 50% chance of having dementia. It's a real problem. And it's costing more than any other disease

Starting point is 00:37:03 because of all the caregiving and disability. When you look at sort of the end-to-end costs, it's more expensive than cancer or heart disease. And it's getting worse and worse and worse because we're living in a society that's full of what I call dementogens, which is not only the metals, but it's also our diet, it's stress, it's lack of sleep, it's our gut microbiome damage, it's the environmental toxins and so forth that we've chatted about. So I think, you know, for me, heavy metal screening is just about as important as checking your blood pressure or your blood sugar or your cholesterol. And it should be standard practice. And I still don't quite know why it's not.

Starting point is 00:37:45 People understand that medicine and lead may be an issue, although they don't really treat it. But mercury is just this blind spot. And if anybody's listening and they want to fund a study where you could just take 1,000 people, track them and do challenge tests on them, and see what the levels are in the background population. No one's really done that. And then see how that correlates with various illnesses and issues. But it's really, this is really sort of this big black hole in medicine that if we actually were able to share what we know in functional medicine with a greater medical community and they were to listen, we would really be able to turn around so many people with difficult

Starting point is 00:38:20 to treat chronic illnesses. Yeah. And like you mentioned, you know, how our genetics are, if we have some variations or some snips in our genetics that can impact how much these heavy metals are impacting our health. And so for this person, he was missing one of the glutathione producing genes, who's GSTM1 absent, which is very common, but can definitely impact how well somebody can produce glutathione and detoxify. He also had a variation in his ApoE gene, which he was a 3-4, which we know increases his risk for memory loss and dementia. But we know one of the reasons it

Starting point is 00:39:02 might be doing that is because people with that genetic variation don't handle heavy metals as well. And so that's a kind of an interesting thing. So we'll look at these. That's me. Yeah. Yeah. I think you too, right? I am.

Starting point is 00:39:17 I am also missing the glutathione gene. My ApoE is okay, but my glutathione gene is not so good. Yeah. So this guy, this gentleman who came to see me, he was 65 and he was concerned about his memory. He had a pretty intense, high power job. He worked in New York city. He was very successful and, you know, was, you know, working very hard, but wanted to be able to continue to work hard and work well. And he was noticing that his memory was not as good as it used to be. And his mom had some dementia in her seventies and his mom's dad.

Starting point is 00:39:51 So his, his maternal grandfather had some memory loss too, as he got older. So, you know, he, he wanted to be as proactive as possible. He was somebody who, who made really good food choices. Most of the time he was trying to eat healthy. He was exercising most days. He was somebody who made really good food choices most of the time. He was trying to eat healthy. He was exercising most days. He didn't sleep enough. He was definitely working a little too much, but he wanted to do as much as he could to stay healthy. As I said, we do a really good detailed history in terms of environmental history, when people come in to see us and, you know, we noticed that one of the things he wasn't doing so well is he was he was picking up sushi often for lunch and he loved tuna sushi, you know, sushi with made of tuna.

Starting point is 00:40:36 And so he did it very often, you know, many, many days at lunchtime, you know, thinking it was a good, healthy choice. But it made me concerned that maybe we should be looking at his mercury levels he had sushi would be fine and tuna would be fine if it wasn't for us damn humans that have put all the coal in the atmosphere which has gone into the oceans and it is taken up by the algae and then is eaten by the little fish who then are eaten by the bigger fish and so on until we're at the top of the food chain. And it is a bad news situation. Yeah, yeah, you're right.

Starting point is 00:41:08 We can't be blaming that tuna. We got to be blaming ourselves here, right? And he had his amalgams replaced. So he had them replaced a few years ago because he just didn't like the silver fillings in his mouth and he had composite put in, but he wasn't really sure if it was done safely or he wasn't really paying attention at the time. So, so for him, we chose to do a provoked heavy metal challenge test. And that test we spoke about where you take a key later and collect urine. And we, um, his mercury level was about 110. And, um, and as you mentioned, there's no good level, but that was definitely concerning to me,

Starting point is 00:41:47 made me say, you know what, we've got to work to bring this down. This is too high. And his blood level, you know, we'll say, you know, I definitely see higher blood levels when people live in urban areas. So I think his blood level was a little bit high, too, probably from maybe recent tuna intake, but also just living in New York City, we see some higher levels, unfortunately. So we started him on, you know, we started him on a medical food, which is a food, it's a powder that has amino acids, like you mentioned, building blocks of protein, which are necessary for the body to detoxify. It also had a bunch of minerals in it, including selenium, which is necessary for the body to make glutathione and molybdenum and zinc and just a really good, you know, really nutrient rich medical food. I also put him on. It had some milk thistle in it, which supports the liver and helps with detoxification. And so we really cleaned up his diet. We gave him some greens, a green powder also. So of course, we want people to be getting all these phytonutrients from their plant foods, but he needed a little extra support. So we gave

Starting point is 00:42:59 him a greens powder and some sulforaphane, which is the component that's in cruciferous vegetables that helps the glutathione work so much better. So, we did a bunch of things just to support his body. And then we started him on a detoxification chelation type of a procedure where we did it orally, but every three days out of every two weeks, we gave him some DMSA to help pull the heavy metals out of his body. But as we've mentioned earlier, it's really important that, you know, we support the body, get the body ready to do this whole process.

Starting point is 00:43:37 So that was one of the things we really focused on. I think that's so key. And I think we have to understand that there is a science to detoxification. It's not like, oh, I'm going to detox and go through a cleanse. This is really a very sophisticated medical process that uses food and exercise and saunas that uses tons of fiber and binders to bind the metals to, and that in a sophisticated way knows how to upregulate all the pathways and the highways to get rid of junk in your body. And it requires the amino acids, it requires minerals like zinc and selenium, it requires all the B vitamins like B12, folate,

Starting point is 00:44:16 and B6. It requires the supplements that can help boost glutathione like N-acetylcysteine, like poic acid and others. And it requires eating a lot of foods that have detoxifying properties. And when you put all that together, you can really profoundly impact the body's load of metals. And on top of that, sometimes you do need a chelator like DMSA, which is a drug. It's an FDA approved drug to prove for lead chelation in kids who are very sick. But it also works against other heavy metals. So we often combine that with these other practices and it's very powerful. And one of

Starting point is 00:44:50 the things you mentioned about this guy, I don't want to skip over, is this APOE3-4 gene in the GSTM1 gene. APOE is a gene that affects lipid metabolism, many other things, but the APOE4 variant of this gene is highly correlated with Alzheimer's. So if you have two, four variants, like in other words, if you are one from your mom and one from your dad, you have about a 75% risk of getting Alzheimer's. It's not inevitable. And we've had patients who have a double four who don't get it because they really focus on their lifestyle and cleaning up everything and you can prevent it. But it makes you much more likely. And what's interesting is that the ApoE4 protein that's made from that gene doesn't have the amino acid cysteine on the chain. And cysteine is one of these really important amino acids that is the building block for glutathione.

Starting point is 00:45:40 It's a sulfur containing amino acid. So these people just cannot clear the metals and when you there was a study i think was done in australia where they took people with apoe4 and they did challenge tests like we're talking about and they found that those who had apoe4 had way higher levels of mercury so it's it's another way to think about it and the glutathione gene we talked about i had an absent level so you know and what happened to this guy is he got better right what happened to his memory i mean we we did a whole we did a process we did this whole protocol for um three months and then rechecked him and his levels were cut in half they were around 54 and then another we did we continued we we continued another three months and then they went down to 10 and then we

Starting point is 00:46:22 did you know we we pulled away the chelator, but continued more detoxification support for him. But what he really noticed was just feeling better. You know, his energy was better. His focus was better. His memory was better. And, you know, he was thankful because he feels like this is going to really help him do well in the way into his 80s and 90s in terms of his overall health,

Starting point is 00:46:46 his and his cognition. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's one of those uncharted territories in medicine. And it breaks my heart because I see so many people suffer needlessly from this. And sadly, if you go to your traditional doctor, they're not going to know what to test. They're not going to do the QS tri test. They're not going to do a urine challenge test where you take a pill and get your urine for six hours and see what your load is. They're not going to know what to do

Starting point is 00:47:10 to tell you to get rid of the mercury from your body except stop eating sushi. They probably won't tell you to get your fillings out because the American Dental Association says it's not an issue, even though the government, now the FDA has said, yeah, it is kind of an issue. And I think, you know, if you have is kind of an issue and and I think you know if you have any kind of chronic ailment it's definitely part of a screening evaluation and you really need to see a functional medicine doctor someone who's really trained and experienced in this and you don't want to be messing around with it if you don't know what you're doing because you can hurt people I've written a lot about this I have a couple of blogs on drhyman.com that are

Starting point is 00:47:42 going to great detail about how to detoxify, how to identify things. I wrote them years ago, but they're still pretty current. If you go, you know, just type in mercury in the search engine on my website, drhyman.com, you'll find the article. Since a lot of background there, we'll put them in the show notes. But I think this is such an important area, Liz. And I think, you know, at the Ultra Wellness Center, this is what we do. We are medical detectives we look for all the factors that may be driving a disease and the truth is you know it's so it's so we call pleomorphic in other words it's it can show up in so many different ways you know one person might cause memory issues

Starting point is 00:48:15 another person might cause an autoimmune issue another person might cause digestive issues another person might cause allergies or you know depression, depression or obesity or, you know, it's like, so how do you know what's causing what? So that's what functional medicine is. It's really a method of finding the root cause using both medical history, which we learned, but also looking at a, we do a very detailed environmental history. Most doctors don't do an environmental history. We want to know everything. And I know you'd be surprised sometimes, like what you find when listening to people. Oh, yeah, well, you know, one woman, she had Parkinson's at 50 years old. And turned out she had grew up in the Bronx and had cockroaches and rats running all over her. And when she moved to Long Island

Starting point is 00:48:58 to get out of the city when she was older, she was a total fanatic about spraying her house for cockroaches and rats inside and outside every month with a chemical called chloridane which is now banned it's a pesticide and she got Parkinson's from that but unless you dig in and figure it out and then we had to detoxify her so I think it's really important to understand that you know these are prevalent problems that heavy metals environmental toxins do cause disease. Doctors are poorly trained in that as they are in nutrition. And that if you really want to get help from a problem that you think is just hanging on, whether it's everything from MS to, you know, digestive issues, headache, whatever it is, you've got to know how to think through these problems. And this is really what functional medicine is all about. At the

Starting point is 00:49:44 Ultra Wellness Center, we've been doing this for decades. And it's so exciting to see, like, the cases you shared where someone was getting sick all the time, someone who was having early dementia, that you can reverse these problems if you identify what the issues are. It's pretty exciting. So any last thoughts about mercury, Liz, and what we should be thinking about? Because, by the way, this applies to all heavy metals, like arsenic, lead, cadmium. We see a lot of that. Mercury is probably the worst. Yeah. You know, I mean, I just want to thank you, Mark, because this is an area, like you said, you've written about for years and years and you've been talking about for years. And, you know,

Starting point is 00:50:18 when you really encouraged me to move forward and get my amalgams replaced and support my detoxification system, it made a world of difference for my health too. You know, my immune system got so much better. My cognition got better. I was, you know, able to focus more during the day and didn't get as tired, but definitely I didn't get as sick as often. So, you know, I really appreciate everything that you've helped me learn over the years in this area because it's and with not just for myself, but my patients. It is that area where you're like, this person is not getting better. Why are they not getting better?

Starting point is 00:50:54 I've got to dig deeper in terms of their detox system. And it's always the area where we're like, oh, that's why, you know, we've got to really support that area. So thank you. Yeah, it's true. And, you know, it just comes up in all kinds of ways. I remember a group of people I've been treating who are special forces soldiers. And these guys, you know, are the toughest of the tough. I mean, you know, like tread water in 30 degree weather for like three hours

Starting point is 00:51:18 and try to get water for three hours. I mean, these guys, you know, do 4,000 pushups. I mean, these guys are no pushover. I mean, I'm exaggerating, obviously. But they are supermen. And a whole bunch of them were getting really sick. And the military were like, oh, they're just, you know, complainers. They're just this.

Starting point is 00:51:37 And sort of dismissed them. And one of the key leaders was an Army Ranger who was a blast expert. And, you know, their job was to blow stuff up So they would go in these blast houses and train other soldiers how to blow stuff up and they would run explosive and shoot guns and these guys levels of metals were off the chart mercury and lead and And no one had identified within the military and we were able to start to treat these patients, chelate them, fix their immune systems, fix their neurologic systems. And these guys who, quote, had chronic fatigue and were dysfunctional, having to go on disability.

Starting point is 00:52:12 These are special forces soldiers. They got better. And even the New York Times wrote an article about how they were treated and they got better. And how scientists at Mount Sinai in New York, which are lead experts, said, well, they've never seen anything like this. They've never seen measuring lead in the bone before and after and seeing it come down because it just doesn't do that. Well, yeah, it does if you know what to do. And that's really the whole point of functional medicine is really getting people to the answers they need, learning how to navigate this landscape of disease in the 21st century using 21st century medicine

Starting point is 00:52:45 which is functional medicine and helping people where where really other approaches really don't work so i'm just so happy to be able to be practicing functional medicine it's been the greatest blessing of my life and to be able to do it with you liz and our colleagues at the ultra wellness center is just it's just so fantastic and you know it's so gratifying because people actually get better not like we were trained in regular medical school you have to manage the diseases and people just don't actually get better me too mark and i'm so grateful to be with you today so thank you for having me all right well thank you everybody for listening to this week's house call if you've enjoyed this little episode of the doctor's pharmacy please share with your friends and family

Starting point is 00:53:22 uh subscriber every year podcast. Leave a comment. We'd love to know if you've had heavy metals, what you've done, how it's worked, what's happened to you. And share with us your insights. And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy.

Starting point is 00:53:43 I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays, nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com

Starting point is 00:54:22 forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter, and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. 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 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,

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The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Tell If Mercury Toxicity Is The Cause Of Your Mysterious Symptoms with Dr. Elizabeth Boham

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