Ah very good responses. So I need to try my best to clarify and outline what I am really getting at.
First off, I just want to explicitly state that I do take serious the mutation issues that concern folate/MeB12 and methylation. I take in particular seriousness, the role of MCS and other pollutants. What makes Chris Shade a more admirable public health person, as well as Natasha Campbell McBride, is that they do justice to the education of the biochemistry involved with chemicals- all chemicals, not just mercury, but the overlying issues people face when they have significant environmentally induced disease.
I can speak from my own family. I can honestly say I have at least two family members who are sick, my mother and aunt, and I know its mercury. I can say I have 4 who have died, and I know it was not mercury. In my mothers case, and in my case, it is probably mercury and methylation dysfunction.
I am very aware of the impracticality of dentistry in trying to replace amalgams. I have little confidence in it, and have heard little to make me believe it is cost effective or safe. I have an aunt who had restorations and other work done who underwent drilling and removal of at least 6 amalgams, without proper IAOMT safety measures, and she became quite ill from it. This is a clear case of the failure of the dentistry approach, but also a clear case of induced mercury exposure. Before she had symptoms of mild toxicity, but no fatigue or FMS issues. I believe in fair game, if you take a high rpm drill to amalgams, that this changes the argument. It is dangerous as hell, especially with multiple amalgams.
My father and mother in particular are at case. They both have predisposition to ulceritive colitis, but because I believe it is environmentally, epigenitically and lifestyle induced I would argue it is caused for different reasons in each of them. In my fathers case, he passed away, not from his UC, but no doubt the UC played a part in running him down. I can also argue that in his case mercury had little fault. I am aware according to what I was told that he had no amalgams. Most likely what played a case in creating his problem was his drug use in his teens. This would have opened up quite a pandora's box in terms of chemical exposure. I am speaking of hard drugs. He had neurological problems quite severely, so I grew up with him out of the picture. He only developed these issues after his teens, quite rapidly. And he developed the UC and CFS along with it. So I am not big on hereditary genetic theories.
I am not a mercury nut. I am a environmentalist nut.
My mother's case is more of a typical issue. History of eating disorders, so you have a strong introduction of multiple deficiencies. She has a long history with alcohol abuse, which is pretty notorious for causing folate and magnesium deficiencies. She had to get potassium shots just a few months ago, so I do not need hair results to tell me her potassium is systemically deficient. I can only surmise the effect of half a pack to pack a day cigarette habit for 30 years.
My stepmother is a much more textbook case of a MCS FMS. She had a history of working in aircraft mechanics for a number of years, in which her bare hands were exposed to some industrial grade degreasers and other related chemicals. She spent quite a few years with mental illness before she even met and married my father. She had to receive shock treatment. Unfortunately big pharma got a hold of her with the usual psychotropics. This would have put a considerable amount of liver toxicity into the equation. I do not know for sure if she had amalgams, so I cannot say mercury played a part in her overall health issues before her death. What I can say is that she was exposed to enough damage from other chemicals to develop CFS and neurological issues.
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I do not doubt the issue with oral vs sublingual b5. I believe this issue applies to multiple nutrients, including minerals. I am in particular reliant on a sublingual usage of the supplement "relora" which contains taurine and magnesium and theanine and a couple Chinese herbs. I cannot take this stuff orally or it just doesn't work for me at all. I think quite a few things are better off sublingual or injected because the liver reactions of sick people are quite unreliable. I can vouch for this with countless herbs. Before I got sick 2 years ago I could get very significant effects from certain herbs taken orally, and over time I came to have significant lack of confidence in my digestion.
I just took a multi-vitamin, and now I feel cruddy as I am writing this. Coincidence, maybe not. I had to put more sublingual Relora and Methyl-folate under my tongue to shake it off.
I contribute this to the functioning of P-450 system reactions and interactions and the pharmacology of these various compounds, to the weakened digestion of people with CFS, celiac, serious food allergies, adrenal fatigue, intestinal permeability, and other liver complications.
Arguably in my life, I have never had good digestion. The best digestion I ever had, was with a diet of fish and fruit/veggie. Essentially a pesco-vegetarian, paleo diet. In my particular case I want to outline why I think mercury is such an issue for me.
I ate fish. I ate a lot of fish for 3 years straight. I ate fish 3 times a day for 3 years straight. No bueno. Not at all. I believe I have methyl mercury poisoning and amalgam poisoning. I begun to realize this with Chris Shade's videos.
I have severe food allergies. I do not believe I have Celiac's. I believe I have had far too many food allergies, especially to milk protein and milk fat. Milk Fat. I have read probably 1000 hours about allergies and autoimmune issues. It got old over the last 4.5 years as I have tried to figure out what is responsible for my weight gain and weight loss. The more practical answers I have heard pin the blame on mercury for creating the actual autoimmune reactions to food, and it is just dairy and gluten that have the worst tendency to become a problem. Gluten and dairy are probably alone responsible for tacking on an extra 70 lbs on me in the last 16 months. Very little changed in my overall diet tendencies besides exposure to more processed foods. But I do not rule out fortified vitamins either. It was the removal of all of these foods that allowed me to lose 125 lbs initially 3.5 years ago.
I would speculate I have lead poisoning also. Some showed up on my hair test at the same level of mercury. Both lead and mercury were low. According to Chris Shade, someone with impaired liver function and GI disease will not excrete methylmercury from the hair. Only methylmercury is excreted in hair. Hair cannot determine if you have been exposed to mercury from amalgams in the elemental form. Mercury speciation is a huge issue not covered well at all by Cutler.
Shade has a background in environmental analytical chemistry. I do too. I spent about a year working on waste water treatment processes checking the effect of N P K speciation affecting aquatic environments. It was a combination of the engineering process of the plant and the ecological studies of aquatic environments. My two strong areas in chemistry are in speciation studies of aquatic pollution and in the etiology of environmental diseases.
I agree mercury issues in alternative health are rampant with quackery. Most people won't touch it, if they are reputable. Gary Null and Mercola will barely talk about it, but have more or less come out against it. Andrew Wakefield was black balled for it. I have encountered a disgusting amount of quackery. I pretty much only consider Shade and Cutler and Gary Null reputable on the subject.
I would argue I have lead poisoning as well. R-lipoic acid and rhodiola are the only two substances I know of that can leach lead out of the bones and sling it around in the body, redistributing it back into the brain/organs. I see lead poisoning as being even more prevalent as a poison in the US and West, or frankly the World, than mercury. Lead poisoned the Romans even, historically because of aquaducts and pipes. I have probably never felt better in the last 16 years of my life than the 4 weeks I first started to take rhodiola. But the come down the following 4 months along with the exposure to ALA was the beginning of my CFS. In some ways I blame ALA and rhodiola for my CFS as much as I blame mercury and fish and food allergies.
I see a lot of characteristic behavior in my family, older uncles and aunts, that suggest to me lead poisoning. And regardless, if my conjecture is wrong, their inevitable mental decline and Alzheimer or dementia will not surprise me.
My grandfather was a merchant marine, worked in salt mines, welded, did metal fabrication, ship construction, and other industrial work. He was exposed to asbestosis, and quite surely a number of metals. Undoubtedly, he was exposed to lead at some point. He has Parkinson's and Alzheimer. He is a genuine Mad Hatter. This is not mercury at work, it is a combination of Gallium, industrial Manganese, lead, and probably even more industrial metals.
He is a good example of chronic disease. His diseases cannot be blamed on lifestyle very well. He is 84. He grew up in the great depression. He had a REAL American diet. He was never exposed to processed foods until he was at least in his 40's. He continued to grow most of his vegetables well into his 70's. He still grows some things. He is still "active". He had a long history of violent tendencies, alcoholism, etc. I think partly this was his real nature, but his workplace exposure is still at issue. He had a long history of being very active. I have seen pictures of him in his 30's. He looked like a body builder. He developed heart disease and weight problems in his 60's but then lost the weight after a bypass. Then he got cancer. He has a long list of diseases. Its surprising how tough he is. One this is certain. My generation won't fair as well as he has with all of his Metal induced diseases. He was raised on a real diet, unprocessed. He worked like a mule into his mid 30's. This protects the body from processed foods, chemicals, and metals. It makes the liver work stronger. The one disease he doesn't have? Diabetes. Not a coincidence.
About Wilson. I will admit that he cannot be fully agreed with. But his diet is not too different than the Natasha Campbell McBride GAPS diet. The arguments about food are not too different than many of those in Micheal Pollan's books, who I will also heavily defend. It was Micheal Pollan and Weston A Price writings that got me on this whole thing 4.5 years ago before I had the onset of CFS issues.
I am not going to argue that Wilson is contradictory. But once again this depends on the frame and context.
I for one do not see the world strictly through biochemical terms. But I adhere to biochemistry and western logic as much as I can. I try not to contradict it, but I am very careful not to fall into reductionist thinking. I have personally benefited a great deal from TCM. I believe in TCM. TCM cannot be explained entirely by western biochemistry. But this is as much a result and fault for it being uninvestigated or unchartered water. People are only really now starting to do pharmacological studies over different herbs. I take into consideration anthropology, history, time, experience- it counts for something in TCM. I understand that if you view history, it is full of tropes, superstition, insanity, and fallacies that western scientific thought has rooted out in the process of modern scientific inquiry. But modern APA/AMA/NIH/ADA approaches are perhaps the most "scientism" adhering reductionist in all of western scientific foundations. I see areas of Physics as being far more open minded towards actual scientific inquiry, while the biological sciences are wrought with reductionist materialist Hegelian dialectic approaches. This has made individual care in medicine a slow process. While it is easy to call quackery against many of the alternative health areas that part ways with standard biochemistry, the orthodoxy of the American Health Care system will still make it very difficult for people who even attempt to use things like Methyl-folate and Methyl-cobalamin.
Personally I am at a point where I feel like I need to start doing what Freddd, Cutler, and Shade are talking about as far as hedging my bet goes. But the diet is a big big issue in all of this, and affects how you metabolize supplements as I pointed out above. A heavy plant based unprocessed diet is about the best way to get mineral levels up. The fact that so many of the people who have claimed success with Cutler, have the same trace hair mineral analysis results with highly consistent patterns of deficiencies, often many of them never having read Wilson, does strongly corroborate the ability of heavy metals to displace mineral absorption. Many people who have heavy metal toxicity have intestinal permeability, weak livers, and mutations in methylation. There are multiple reasons why they are not absorbing minerals.
I am not parsing my words when I talk about multi-factorial environmentally induced chronic degenerative diseases. It is a many many headed hydra beast, not easily dealt with. CFS, diabetes, Parkinson's, mineral deficiencies, cancer, food allergies, UC, FMS, MCS, are a package deal.
I am definitely not about to jump in and defend Lucky Charms for adding folic acid to cereals. I don't doubt the involvement.