Why "the values in the hair test do not represent the minerals in your body"? Because of the way TEI does the testing, or because the pattern shows deranged mineral transport?
As I understand the only way to know for sure if its mercury, is to start chelation and see if I get any reactions (better or worse)?
I subscribed to the frequent-dose-chelation Yahoo group, and they told me to first X-ray the teeth to be sure there is no bit of amalgam left.
This is my full list of symptoms, maybe it gives some more insight, maybe its not even OCD but something else, I don't know:
MENTAL SYMPTOMS
* I am a very slow person. I am slow to think, slow to do stuff, slow to eat. I have always been like that. As a child at dinner, once everyone was finished eating, I was still eating for another hour. Now I am 35 years old and I'm still the same, almost everything else in life takes me significantly much time (normal things, which everyone does, like getting dressed, eating, etc). Its hurting my life tremendously, as after I subtract from 24 hours the time I sleep, the time I need for daily body maintenance tasks like eating, dressing, showering, brushing teeth, shaving, there is very little time of the day left for me. I often resort to just skipping things, not showering, recently I grew a beard, just to have more time of the day left.
* I get mentally tired quickly and need a lot of mental rest often, just to be able to use my brain properly again. Many times during the day I do not feel physically tired, I feel physically very energetic, but I can't seem to just use my brain any more, I need to take many breaks during the day when I don't use my brain too much, like walking in nature, sitting on grass, etc, and then I am good to go again.
* This all leaves very little time during the day when I can actually do useful stuff. Out of 24 hours of the day, I maybe have roughly usually only 4 hours left when I can do stuff. The remaining 20 hours is taken up by body maintenance tasks (sleep/rest/cook/eat/wash/poop/revive). I need to revive mentally (for 5-20 minutes) even after washing dishes, eating or pooping! I'm NOT physically tired, I just feel like I can't think more even about simplest stuff until my brain unwinds.
* I have terrible short-term memory, I can think of doing something, and then 5 seconds later I forgot what it was that I wanted to do, so I have to stop doing anything and think what it was that I wanted to do, and it can take a few minutes, so doing things is stalled. Actually whatever I do it seems like over 80% of the time is spent stalled waiting for my brain to retrieve and process information or mentally rest, and little time is spent doing anything. Someone new tells me their name, and I can forget it minutes later, and ask again about it. I can't remember faces of people I've seen and later when I see them again, even some minutes/hours later the same day, I have to think intensively is it the same person I already seen, or someone else, and often I am wrong about that.
* I have to write down what I am doing in big letters on pieces of paper and put it in front of me, so I see the piece of paper all the time, otherwise I forget what I am doing while doing it, and have to stop and think "what it was that I was doing?". But I think my long term memory is quite good, its just the short-term I feel its terrible. Once I learn them, I can remember long numbers for a long time, have no problems remembering various different PIN codes, bank account numbers.
* Sometimes I am doing something, and out of a sudden I stop and start looking at some object or into the distance, and a few minutes or more pass without me even noticing, and then I “wake-up” and wonder “what I was doing that I was doing”? If this happens several times a day, even if only for a few minutes each time, this can easily in total take out an hour of my precious time of the day. I also spend a lot of time throughout the day looking around the room or area, wondering about totally unimportant things, like whether a certain line is straight or not, sorting and aligning things lying on the table, etc. Each time this happens, I realize after a few minutes that its useless, and I should not be doing this, and stop and go back to my task, but before I realize a few minutes pass, and if this happens several times a day, there is another hour lost. It seems like my brain is forcing these frequent micro-brakes many times a day, as its not able to handle useful thinking any more, and it resorts to useless micro-tasks to unwind a bit.
* Each time I am doing something, no matter how small and easy, my brain takes a few minutes to think about why, how, in what way I should do this, and this happens even for completely easy, no-brainer tasks, which should require no thought, especially if they have been done thousands of times in life already, and actually doing the task takes 30 seconds (examples: fetching an item from the cupboard, putting on an item of clothing, etc.). My brain often adds 5 minutes of thinking before the 30 seconds of doing, so simple things take me 10 times longer then they reasonably should.
* I feel like about 80% of the time I am living overstressed, and struggle to handle everyday life tasks, and feel overwhelmed, when in fact I don't have an (objectively) stressful life at all. Its just almost everything can make me overstressed. When I can't handle it any more, I resort to doing things super-slow, and not looking at the time, this calms me down.
* Often I stop doing what I am doing, because some thoughts come to my mind, and I feel an unstoppable urge to analyze them, sometimes something catches my attention, like a bird, a cloud, a dot on the wall, and I spend minutes analyzing them, without realizing how much time have passed. Then of course everything what I was doing stalls.
* When I am doing something, even though I am finished, I often repeatably continue doing the same thing, checking, and rechecking and redoing, as if I didn't believe it was actually done. When I write something, even not so important, sometimes I can continuously go over the text I wrote like in an endless loop, so it takes me half a day until I realize I am done. Sometimes I've done something, and very soon I don't remember if I had done it already recently or not, so I have to do it again (things like brushing teeth, locking door, etc).
* I have an impression I am declining intellectually over the years. I forget common words, sometimes can't focus enough to read, I have difficulty carrying on conversations because I'm anxious and mentally exhausted just by an ordinary conversation.
* I am very bad at filtering speech from surrounding noise. Often in a loud environment I can't understand what someone is saying, because I can't separate the speech and the noise, even though I see everyone else talking without problems. This makes it difficult and unsatisfactory to participate in social events, where there is music and/or other people talking. Even a cafe can be too noisy for me to sit down with someone else and talk, because I will not understand the words through the noise and have to ask them to repeat louder all the time.
* Sometimes people tell me I am speaking too loud to them, when I don't feel that way, and I feel if I spoke quieter I wouldn't hear myself.
* Conversation with other people requires a lot of exhausting mental effort from me, and is often interrupted by uncomfortably lengthy silence pauses, me thinking what to say, unless I am talking about a very narrow specific technical issue which I know a lot about, then I can talk effortlessly forever about a narrow subject, well at least long enough to bore anyone for whom its not his/her passion. But conversation about “normal” everyday topics requires a lot of effort from me, and I can rarely do it in a fluent manner, without lengthy thought pauses.
* I can be very talkative when I am with just 1 person, max 2, but when more people are around, I can suddenly lock-up myself in my own thoughts, and stop being able to have a meaningful conversation, withdraw from the situation and lock-up in some mental shell.
* If I want to get something done during the day, I often skip shower, put the same clothes I had yesterday because choosing something else would require too much mental effort and waste another half an hour, skip grooming, washing, brushing teeth, doing any kind of cleaning, even skip eating, skip any social contact, and only then I have time to actually get something done that day.
* It often takes me a lot of time to actually start doing something, my brain is over-analyzing everything, even tasks which are a no-brainer, and I know it, I can spend extensive amounts of time for preparing myself mentally to do the task.
* I get stressed very easily, and the stress paralyzes my capability to get anything done for the rest of the day (or at least until I clear it by having a nap, walk in nature). Even things like someone passing by can stress me, when I drive it stresses me if someone is driving directly behind me, so sometimes I stop on the road shoulder to let them pass, and have no one driving just behind me. The passage of time stresses me, if I planned do eat at a certain hour, and then because I was doing something I didn't realize how much time has passed, and its already 3 hours later, I get super-stressed, and have to waste another half an hour to calm myself down before I can continue.
SENSORY INPUT SYMPTOMS
* I have a very poor ability to filter sensory input, so anything that happens around me, takes my attention, and then I can not then think or do what I was doing, because something is happening. Often I am not able do two things at the same time, even so simple and theoretically non-conflicting like washing the dishes and talking. If someone says something to me, I stop washing the dishes, then think for a bit what to say and then respond.
* I am very sensitive to light, and have to squint my eyes in sunlight conditions when other people don't have to.
* I am sensitive to sound, noise, sometimes I even find it difficult to do even simple tasks like cleaning if there is music playing.
PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS
* I often got a stitch while running, I can't run, but I can walk very fast.
* Easily bleeding gums, I have to use an old, softened toothbrush to brush without bleeding, if I use a new toothbrush, my gums will bleed.
* My breathing is kind of strange, sometimes I have some kind of difficulty breathing, for no apparent reason, difficult to explain.
WHAT I ALREADY TRIED
* Over 3 years of 100% gluten-free, grain-free, processed-food-additives free.
* Over 2 years of being 99% refined-sugar-free, MSG-free, all-industrially-processed-carbohydrates-free.
* Four 60-capsule bottles of Prescript-Assist over several months.
* 50g of Custom Probiotics D-lactate-free 9-strain formula, 250 billion CFU/gram, over 2 months.
* Ten 450 billion CFU sachets of VSL#3 over 1 week.
I don't know where they come from but these are typical for autism. (I absolutely don't have autism myself.) There is a post that may describe what you are talking about. 