Amalgam Illness: Diagnosis and Treatment

This book explains how the modern epidemic of disabling, incurable chronic diseases is due to unrecognized mercury poisoning. Many conditions, from Parkinson’s disease and autism – widely recognized as terrible afflictions – to those like chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia which, though equally serious, are disparaged as “Yuppie flu” can be undiagnosed mercury poisoning. The book explains WHY mercury poisoning is so widespread, yet seldom diagnosed. Proper diagnostic procedures are given so that sick people can decide what is wrong rather than trying random treatments. This book explains how to cure chronic mercury poisoning, what to do to control the problems it causes, and provides the real technical information needed for diagnosis and treatment in a straightforward manner. This down to earth book lets patients take care of themselves. It also lets doctors who are not familiar with chronic mercury intoxication treat it. The book is a practical guide to getting well.

Mercury can cause a bewildering variety of problems. In fact, one of the major criticisms of amalgam illness is that it is cited as the cause of so many things. But, like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, mercury can indeed cause many diseases. Modern physicians are not trained to find the root cause of a sick person’s problems. They are trained to translate what they see into latin, look it up in their textbook, and apply a cookbook treatment. With a toxin that poisons fundamental metabolic processes different people will experience different symptoms to start off, depending on their own individual biochemistry. As the poisoning becomes more and more serious, further symptoms surface and the modern doctor adds more diagnoses – a patient who starts with depression might later be considered to have hypothyroidism, allergies and asthma in addition. But no thought is given to why one person should develop more and more “diseases,” when a single diagnosis – chronic mercury poisoning – could account for them all. Some of the “diseases” a modern physician might mistakenly misdiagnose chronic mercury poisoning as are:

• Addison’s disease
• Gastritis
• Allergies
• Hypogonadism
• Alzheimer’s’ disease
• Hypothyroidism
• Amylotrophic lateral sclerosis
• Infertility
• Ankylosing spondylitis
• Insomnia
• Anorexia nervosa
• Irritable bowel syndrome
• Anxiety
• Juvenile arthritis
• Asthma
• Learning disabilities
• Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
• Lupus erythromatosus
• Autoimmune disease
• Manic depression
• Bipolar disorder
• Multiple chemical sensitivities
• Borderline personality disorder
• Multiple sclerosis
• Bulimia
• Myasthenia gravis
• Candidiasis
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder
• Chronic fatigue
• Panic attacks
• Colitis
• Parkinson’s disease
• Crohn’s disease
• Pervasive developmental disorder
• Depression
• Psychosis
• Endocrine disorders
• Rheumatoid arthritis
• Environmental illness
• Schizophrenia
• Fibromyalgia
• Sciatica
• Food allergies
• Sleep disorders
• Yeast syndrome

• Introduction
• Medicine, controversy and mercury
• Why worry about mercury poisoning?
• What mercury poisoning does to you
• Do you have it? How to diagnose mercury poisoning
• What to do about mercury poisoning
• What to take for mercury poisoning
• Descriptions of stuff you can take (Materia medica)
• Appendix
• Index

This is not the first time in the history of modern medicine that a very obvious disease was belittled and ignored. Until recently it was believed that ulcers were entirely psychosomatic. Ulcer sufferers underwent prolonged treatment, were seldom cured, and often ended up under the surgeon’s knife. After years of intense criticism and ridicule – about 20 years after the research was published – it has finally been accepted that most ulcers are due to helicobacter pylorii infection which can be easily cured with appropriate antibiotic therapy. At least by the medical schools and licensing boards. Yet it is still common to find physicians who still treat ulcers by prescribing acid suppressors – as if they resulted from too much stomach acid.

Cholesterol was held out as the root cause of atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease for about 30 years during which the correct evidence that elevated homocysteine played a major role was ridiculed and ignored.

Older physicians still remember when “there was no such thing as Epstein Barr Virus (mononucleosis).”

And who can forget Lyme disease? A housewife fell ill. Her arthritis and other symptoms were diagnosed as psychosomatic. When her husband and children came down with similar symptoms, this was regarded as some kind of projection of her psychosomatic complaint. She was eventually able to convince physicians that the only crazy thing was assuming that something psychosomatic could be contagious!

Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome is still routinely considered a psychiatric disorder despite the repeated publication of physical and laboratory abnormalities always found in victims of it. When it can no longer be ignored, it is dismissed with a bit of namecalling – “Yuppie flu.”

And in less recent times, another form of mercury poisoning – acrodynia – was endemic for 150 years until physicians recognized mercury as the causal agent. The disease was promptly eliminated by changing the formulation of certain infant care products.

It is common for two conflicting but legitimate segments of the medical community to be at odds as to the methods for diagnosing and treating certain conditions. Where there is more than one recommended method of diagnosis or therapy and none of them are used exclusively and uniformly by all physicians, a physician is acting ethically and in accordance with the law if he uses one of these approved methods, even if it later turns out to be the wrong one.
Thus, in controversial areas, the burden really is on the patient to decide whether to accept the physician’s diagnosis and proposed a treatment plan or to seek another. This is why patients’ rights exist and are strongly protected by law. So if you are getting diagnoses like “there is nothing wrong,” or “it’s all in your head” and proposed treatment plans like “try ignoring it and seeing if it goes away,” you have no obligation to accept these. If you want another diagnosis or treatment plan, you have to find another physician who follows different methods of diagnosis and treatment for this kind of condition.

In an overall lifestyle sense, the fact that symptoms come and go leads to the victim having periods of weeks to years of being highly functional and productive, interspersed with periods of being nonproductive and having a hard time getting anything done. Life seems to progress in fits and starts. Great progress is made on projects which later get shelved for long periods. As the disease continues, the productive periods become shorter, fewer, and farther between.

There are emotional changes in mercury poisoning. Depression slowly sets in. Victims feel fatigued and listless. They lack motivation – even for crucial tasks. They lose interest in their surroundings and in their own life. They do not enjoy life, or experience happiness or joy. They experience constant fear e. g. of losing their job. They may be very tense. They feel hopeless. They have a sense of impending doom. Every small problem is discouraging. Minor difficulties seem overwhelming and insurmountable.

The altered emotional state of a mercury intoxicated person leads to impaired interpersonal relationships. They become increasingly irritable and sensitive, reacting strongly to relatively innocent remarks. They may not be able to take orders, instructions, or suggestions without losing their temper. They resent criticism and may interpret innocent remarks critically. They may have an exaggerated response to stimulation and become fearful or anxious and nervous. They may project their fears and anxieties onto others, making inappropriate criticisms or attacks. They become shy and avoid dealing with strangers. While timid, they may unexpectedly lose self-control with strangers. They may wish to visit with friends and family extensively, often wishing to engage in long, repetitive conversations, then withdraw for prolonged periods of time. They withdraw more and more from social contacts.

Intelligence gradually deteriorates. Previously bright persons become dull and slow in thinking. They suffer from a progressive decline specifically affecting short term memory as well as the faculties for logical reasoning. Thus their ability to do things like balance the checkbook, do math, or play chess suffers. They lose the ability to concentrate. Memory problems may be more from distractability and inability to concentrate and pay enough attention to get things INTO their memory than an actual failure to remember things (thus they may complain of memory problems but do well on memory tests). They cease being motivated towards their work or other tasks. Thoughts become heavy, repetitive and pedantic. Creative thinking becomes progressively more difficult, eventually becoming impossible. They become unable to select the right words to convey their meaning and make stylistic and grammatical errors. Their ability to express themselves declines progressively.

There is a distinctive cognitive symptom of being unable to think clearly without great effort. The best description for people who have not experienced it is of a hangover without pain. People who have experienced it will recognize the term “brain fog” as entirely descriptive. As the victim’s level of intoxication waxes and wanes, they go through periods of life when they do or do not dream. Dreaming may be in black and white.

Early physical symptoms include dizziness, tinnitus (ringing in the ears), insomnia, daytime drowsiness, loss of appetite, a tendency towards diarrhea – often alternating with constipation, cold hands and feet, a tendency towards sweating (some people have the opposite symptom and do not sweat at all), flushing or reddening of the skin – particularly on the face and neck. Some people blush frequently, but others do not blush at all. Asthma is a symptom of chronic mercury poisoning. Digestive disturbances are also common.

The skin becomes dry, athlete’s foot and toenail fungus progress, and the insides of the ankles, particularly behind the ankle bone and a bit above it become dry, itchy, flaky and peel. This often becomes painful and annoying enough to keep the victim up at night. Even after fungus and yeast infection has been eliminated hyperkeratosis, often with papular erythema and itching are common.

The hair becomes thinner, dryer, duller, less strongly colored, slower growing, and more brittle. The biological clock is disturbed. Waking up late and staying up late is more common than being an “early bird.” Try as they might, the mercury poisoned person simply cannot control their circadian rhythm.

Victims may become photophobic and find bright light uncomfortable and unpleasant. There may be visual disturbances, including alterations in color perception leading to reduced sensitivity to the color red, or color blindness. The ability to focus on distant objects may be sporadically impaired. Peripheral vision may be reduced in the most severe cases. The hands and feet often become distinctly cold. This can occur suddenly and is most distinctive when combined with sweating. Later in more severe poisoning they may also tingle or lose feeling.

The effects of mercury on the mouth are receding, sometimes spongy gums that bleed easily and teeth that are ‘loose’ in their sockets and can be wiggled very slightly. It also causes excessive salivation and unusually bad breath.

Mercury interferes with the sense of smell which becomes less acute, and later with hearing, in which perception of sounds does not diminish as notably as the patient’s ability to understand and interpret them – e. g. to understand speech directed at them even though they hear it clearly. Victims often experience discomfort that feels like a “tight band around their head.” They may also experience sharp points of discomfort in their ear canals at bedtime.

Mercury also interferes with the body’s ability to regulate temperature. Victims may alternate between being hot and cold when the temperature isn’t changing, or have to wear more clothes than other people, or have more difficulty than other people in staying comfortable while the temperature changes. Temperature disregulation also leads to ‘night sweats.’

Amalgam illness is analogous to a war. Your enemy, mercury, captured a beachhead in your teeth and fortified it with amalgam. Then it launched an attack. House to house. Organ to organ. Cell to cell. Slowly capturing your body. You win the war with a surgical strike. Dental surgery. Drill out those fillings. Removing your amalgam declares an armistice. Fighting stops, but the mercury atoms are still dug in wherever they reached. Chelation sends clean up squads off to round up the enemy and escort them out. Meanwhile, the surviving cells in your body get to work and to repair the war damage. Supplementation is like disaster relief – it makes the process go a lot faster.

There are two goals to treatment. First, get rid of the mercury. Second, control symptoms so you can be comfortable and productive during the prolonged period when mercury is removed and healing takes place. In order to control your symptoms, it is necessary to identify the metabolic defects mercury is causing for you.

In your ongoing battle to control symptoms while the mercury comes out and your body repairs all the damage, you need to take a straightforward, common-sense approach.

Know yourself. If you react to everything, go slow, start with small doses of things, be patient. Don’t be any more aggressive than your body and your psyche can tolerate.

Start with the problems that are causing other problems.

If your digestion is not working, get your guts fixed up since this will take a load off your liver and let you get helpful supplements and medicines into you.

Make sure your hormones are working right. Treat your body, not numbers on a lab report.

Solve the other troublesome problems, and find solutions that work for you.

It is very common for mercury poisoned people to have been treated for depression, and for most MD’s to diagnose them as “just depressed.” While depression is often present it is not the cause of the problem. It should be treated to reduce suffering. The underlying problems causing it must be identified and treated too – just treating depression is like continuing to give painkillers day after day for a broken arm instead of setting it and putting it in a cast.