microsilica--powerful chelator

[brenda]

But last October I went into a severe relapse and I've been in bed most of the time since. I don't think that was anything to do with amalgam removal - it's just the natural course of my illness

.

Jenny Cutler says that the body starts to dump the mercury months after the amalgams come out and one needs to get it out.

 

[Jenny]

.

Jenny Cutler says that the body starts to dump the mercury months after the amalgams come out and one needs to get it out.

Yes I've heard that Brenda, but what evidence does he have for this? What's written about all this is so contradictory, especially what's written about chelation.

I almost always relapse when the seasons change so I can't help thinking it was just my normal pattern and the amalgam removal made no difference.

Jenny

 

[natasa778]

another type of silica supplement, much cheaper than microsilica: http://www.blueherbs.co.uk/shop/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=111 - (it made a tremendous difference to my energy levels, although not 'officially' CFS I have felt borderline for years)

 

[brenda]

Hi Jenny

I was on the Cutler forum for a while and people were reporting thatt hey had the dump about 9 months on. I tend to believe what sufferers say.

 

[Jenny]

Hi again Brenda

But I always wonder how people know they are 'dumping' mercury. Even blood and stool tests seem to be unreliable. When I feel a lot worse, there are all sorts of things that could be going on - increase in cytokines, killing of bacteria, cyclical reactivation of viruses or bacteria, intolerance to a food etc etc.

Did you find the Cutler protocol helpful?

Jenny

 

[brenda]

Jenny I think you get to learn it while you are chelating. I cannot follow the protocol as I still have amalgams in and am not well enough for removal yet.

 

[Lotus97]

O.N.

I took microsilica before bed too.

Re: chelating mercury, the problem is that there is no really reliable way to test your mercury load. It can "hide" in viruses and biofilms (see the biofilm thread) and not show on provoked heavy metal tests or hair samples. It is a tricky business!

I see my doc tomorrow and I'll post an update. I may have to go offline for a day if he does an LED, but I'll be back!

Sushi

What do you mean by "testing your mercury load"? Is that different than testing whether you have mercury toxicity? Is it the same with copper as well?

 

[Sushi]

What do you mean by "testing your mercury load"? Is that different than testing whether you have mercury toxicity? Is it the same with copper as well?

Hi Lotus,

It is checking the degree of heavy metal toxicity. I used Genova's Toxic Element Clearance Profile. It measures 21 toxic elements and places your results in a reference range. For instance I tested very high on Gallium and low on Mercury. Copper is not shown on this test as I guess it isn't normally considered a toxic element. I did have my copper level tested with another Genova test though.

Sushi

 

[pemone]

But what I said before the "precautions" comment addresses the worrying about doing anything before having fillings removed. I understand Cutler's protocol..and others- I think they just want to stress- get those fillings out, period. But unless there's something else out there that shows it really is a big no no to do something like this with the fillings still intact, I just don't see how it's any different than worrying about the mercury floating around other parts of your body. See Sushi's quotes and my response.

I'm open to seeing the evidence. But unless it's there it makes no sense to scare people away from chelating heavy metals from their body just because they still have their fillings. And can't afford to get them out, or whatever.

O.N., I dont' understand your thinking. When you take a two-thiol chelator like DMSA, it goes into the blood, escapes in the saliva, then chelates off the mercury fillings. You end up absorbing that by swallowing it. Why do you try to compare that to the mercury load your body already has? Mercury in the filling is contained in the filling. By chelating with that intact, you are increasing your body load of elemental mercury. Why would you do that? Why would you insist on someone producing a double blind study to show you why that is dangerous? If someone was telling you to not drive a car into a wall at 60 mph would you stubbornly refuse to believe that was bad as well, until someone showed you a double blind study?

Honestly, I think some people have a death wish.

Take a look starting at 24:10 on this video:

They show low levels of inorganic mercury in the rinsate of the mouth of a person who has amalgams. They then adminster a mouthwash of N Acetyl Cysteine and the amount of inorganic mercury goes off the chart, increasing 2000 times. Swallow that and the body absorbs it.

What they don't tell you in that video is that N Acetyl Cysteine is only a single thiol so it is not even a true chelator. What you are proposing is to do is take oral DMSA, which is a true two thiol chelator. And - even worse - if you are chelating with amalgams in place it is not like the mouthwash where you have a one time massive exposure. The DMSA would be in the blood for days or weeks, and would then be leaking into saliva through blood continuously during that period. This would be a large continuous exposure of inorganic mercury from your mouth throughout the chelation period.

Why would you do that? Why would you wonder about whether you should do it? Why would you ask someone to produce a double blind study showing you shouldn't do it?

 

[PeterPositive]

O.N., I dont' understand your thinking. When you take a two-thiol chelator like DMSA, it goes into the blood, escapes in the saliva, then chelates off the mercury fillings. You end up absorbing that by swallowing it.

Interesting. My doc is proposing to use DMSA to lower mercury (in particular methyl-mercury) burden, although I still have 2 small amalgams in my mouth.

I haven't finished seeing the whole video (very interesting) but I got to a point where he's illustrating the difference between DMSA and DMPS, stating that the former will essentially only move methyl-Hg. If that's the case then isn't it contradicting the idea that it will chelate the mercury fillings?

thanks

 

[*GG*]

Honestly, I think some people have a death wish.

Take a look starting at 24:10 on this video:

Why would you do that? Why would you wonder about whether you should do it? Why would you ask someone to produce a double blind study showing you shouldn't do it?

When you have had this illness for years with little, if any, gains in health. Some people throw caution to the wind! Is death really the worst that can happen to some of us?

GG

 

[pemone]

Interesting. My doc is proposing to use DMSA to lower mercury (in particular methyl-mercury) burden, although I still have 2 small amalgams in my mouth.

I haven't finished seeing the whole video (very interesting) but I got to a point where he's illustrating the difference between DMSA and DMPS, stating that the former will essentially only move methyl-Hg. If that's the case then isn't it contradicting the idea that it will chelate the mercury fillings?

I don't know the chemistry, but you find plenty of articles online like this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_poisoning
that contains the sentence: "Chelation therapy for acute inorganic mercury poisoning can be done with DMSA...."

That's playing with fire and I would not do it. And the thing is there is a safe way to dispose of your organic (methyl) mercury that does not involve those risks.

The hard part of mercury that the liver disposes of through bile into the intestine is that up to 95% of that can get reabsorbed by the body. This creates an insidious round trip problem and makes detox very hard.

What you want is a binder. Something like the Quicksilver IMD is an engineered silica particle that is covalently bound to many thiols. You swallow it hours before you eat or take supplements, and it then attracts any of the mercury in your bile that is being discarded by the liver. It guarantees that most of the mercury gets out of your body before it gets reabsorbed. Many people use chlorella for this, but that is a bad binder. It only has one thiol and just weakly holds onto the mercury and releases it.

I would still ask Quicksilver if there is some risk in taking IMD while you have fillings in your mouth. I guess in theory the IMD will chelate those fillings when you swallow it but that is a one time event. It's not like DMSA where you are putting the chelator into your blood 24x7 and you therefore create a continuous chelation of the fillings 24x7 from saliva.

But, honestly, why do this at all? Why not just get the two fillings removed and replaced? It's far less hassle. If you had 12 fillings and lots of root canals and it was going to be a financial catastrophe as well as technically difficult, then I would totally understand. You don't have that excuse.

 

[pemone]

When you have had this illness for years with little, if any, gains in health. Some people throw caution to the wind! Is death really the worst that can happen to some of us?

I understand this. For the first six months of my own illness I woke every day feeling like I would die within one week. The complete despair you feel knowing that you are the only one who can rescue yourself, when you are completely compromised and unable to think or work, is truly overwhelming.

I'm the first to admit that getting rid of mercury is a tough problem. But it is not like terminal cancer where you can only delay a final result. If you navigate it correctly you can beat mercury. The process isn't that difficult:

1) Get a diagnosis, and the only test I trust at this point is the Quicksilver Mercury Tri-Test because:
a) They have much more precise measurement limits.
b) They are the only ones who measure organic (e.g., fish) and inorganic (e.g., fillings) separately.
c) They are the only ones who compare hair, blood, and urine at one test in order to calculate how well your body disposes of mercury.

If you have low levels of exposure and the test shows that you dispose of it very well, then you certainly have a basis for making a decision to focus on other things besides mercury. Knowing what I know now, I would still remove amalgams, but you would at least have a choice. On the other hand, if you have a massive methylmercury load from food and your liver is doing a poor job of disposing, then your tissues are piling up a load and you need to do something about it.

2) Find a mercury-safe dentist and get all the amalgams removed. Unfortunately, that means check under crowns as some of those may have mercury as well, and get the crowns replaced with engineered ceramic crowns with no metal liners. It's critical to find a dentist experienced in this procedure, and the key things he must do:
a) Let you breathe oxygen during removal. Train yourself to breathe through the nose not mouth during procedure.
b) Use a HEPA filter near your mouth to remove vapor and filter out the elemental mercury.
c) Use water on the drill to keep drilling temperatures low.
d) Use a dental dam, in order to keep any bits of mercury that come loose during drilling from being swallowed.
I live in a major urban area, and I only found four dentists qualified to do this work within a 75 miles radius. You need to do homework.
My advice to anyone doing this is to have inlays instead of composite fillings for any tooth that is a major chewing surface. Composite fillings will need replacement every five years but inlays are permanent.

3) You need nutritional support for the things that mercury attacks, like zinc. I got a Metametrix ION Profile and dozens of other tests and that helped my osteopaths get me on the right path. I actually hired three osteopaths, and what is interesting is I got three different diagnoses, but they all said the same thing at their core:
Osteopath #1: he looked at ION Profile and told me I had severe problems with magnesium, zinc, B6, B12, and several other nutrients and needed to supplement.
Osteopath #2: he diagnosed pyluria, which attacks B6, magnesium, zinc, manganese, etc. (I later read that some people think "pyluria" is caused by mercury...many allopaths will tell you that this is not a disease and it is controversial.)
Osteopath #3: he ran a porphyrins test, which showed exposure to lead and mercury. We then ran separate blood, urine, and hair tests for mercury, and all three put me 95th percentile high end of scale. Mercury creates deficiencies in zinc, b6, etc.
So all three doctors were pointing to the same conclusions by totally different methods!
Based on that result I read Dr Andrew Cutler's books, hired a local biochemist directly, and ended up having one of my doctors hire Cutler himself.
At this point I am on a fistful of supplements each day. Half this stuff is probably as harmful as it is beneficial. Some things are no brainers, like zinc and magnesium and b6. Others are more controversial.

4) You need a strategy for making sure your gut doesn't reabsorb the mercury your liver excretes through bile. Per my other post just now, up to 95% of the mercury in bile gets reabsorbed by the gut. After much research, I plan to use Quicksilver's IMD product, as it is engineered exactly for this purpose and they have good measurement data showing over six months how it effectively lowers methylmercury burden in blood (which in turn implies the mercury is getting out of body).

5) You may optionally want to consider a chelator. In my case I hurt myself by taking a chelator ALA incorrectly and I may have moved mercury into my brain. The neurological symptoms I have are:
* 24x7 sound of a tuning fork, which can at times become so loud I cannot sleep.
* post exertional malaise becomes a day later intense brain fog so severe I cannot focus.
* some kind of neurological excitotoxicity, which is the vague feeling that some part of my brain is firing all of its neurons rapidly, which is extremely uncomfortable and just drains me
* visual abnormalities in both eyes, and in the left eye the beginnings of cataracts, which is bizarre for my age. It turns out research shows mercury increases incidence of cataracts 25 TIMES!
After studying all of the chelation protocols, I think Dr Cutler's is the best thought out. It involves low doses of oral chelators. And correct use and timing of ALA is the only way to get the mercury out of my brain.

6) Learn what is dangerous and avoid it:
* Say no to IV chelators. They can do permanent damage.
* Test for sulfur food sensitivity, and if you have it you need to get good at redesigning your life to avoid sulfur
* Avoid single thiol foods like NAC and glutathione and chlorella. For me anyway, they move around the mercury without disposing of it, and they make me feel sicker.
* A lot of so called support supplements contain chelators like ALA or sulfur-based single-thiol substances that make you feel bad. The Quicksilver supplements often combine with ALA, which I don't think makes any sense at all. If you buy into Cutler's thinking on ALA and timing doses to the half-life of the chelator, taking large one-time ALA doses is a way to poison your brain, not chelate.

All of this is tricky, but it's not impossible to do it. Just be careful, ask lots of questions, be very conservative in treatment.

 

[PeterPositive]

When you have had this illness for years with little, if any, gains in health. Some people throw caution to the wind! Is death really the worst that can happen to some of us?

Sad but true

 

[Lynn_M]

Pone linked to the second of five video talks by Dr. Chris Shade. I recommend watching all 5, available on YouTube. The first in the series is at

, and the other 4 are linked from there in the right column.

After watching the first 4 videos so far, it seems to me that the Quicksilver products are far superior to using DMSA. DMSA and DMPS seem like old school products compared to what is now available from Quicksilver Scientific. There are a number of products that are recommended to be used together, in addition to the IMD. I share one of Pone's reservation though. After reading and using Dr. Andy Cutler's protocol, I too wondered how problematic it would be to take Quicksilver's Nanosphere Vitamin C/R-Lipoate just a few times a day, rather than based on half-life scheduling. It would be interesting to know what Dr. Shade's response would be to the issue of half-life scheduling.

Regarding PeterPositive's question about DMSA essentially removing only methyl mercury. If I'm remembering the videos correctly, removing methylmercury will ultimately lower the level of inorganic mercury. There is some interconversion between the two forms of mercury. The first video in the series discusses that issue.

I was left with the impression from the videos that using the constellation of Quicksilver's products appears to have the potential to greatly speed up the process of mercury detoxification.

 

[Lynn_M]

There is a 3 minute YouTube video where Dr. Chris Shade is being interviewed www.youtube/watch?v=zc3eTtY39eU. The title of the video is Can you Detox While Keeping Amalgam Fillings? Chris' answer is a yes, if you use the new chelators, conditional on using certain other measures and conditions. But definitely not if using the old chelators.

 

[PeterPositive]

This is all very interesting and I will look into the Quicksilver products etc... the only problem I see is, even trusting Quicksilver 100% I would still love to have multiple resources on these "new chelators" and some independent verifications.

How many times I have seen groundbreaking new products in this field supported by internal research and quite a lot of hype...

DMSA has been used for a long time and it's well known in terms of toxicity, dosages, side effects etc...

Anyways I will dig into the available material soon to learn more.

Thanks

 

[pemone]

Pone linked to the second of five video talks by Dr. Chris Shade. I recommend watching all 5, available on YouTube. The first in the series is at

, and the other 4 are linked from there in the right column.

After watching the first 4 videos so far, it seems to me that the Quicksilver products are far superior to using DMSA. DMSA and DMPS seem like old school products compared to what is now available from Quicksilver Scientific. There are a number of products that are recommended to be used together, in addition to the IMD.

I think something needs to be made explicit here. There are two disposal routes for Mercury out of the body:

* The liver disposes through bile, into the intestine. The problem is up to 95% of that can be reabsorbed, making disposal very inefficient.

* The inorganic mercury in the blood comes out through the kidneys. THIS is the disposal path that traditional two-thiol chelators like DMSA and DMPS use.

Note that the two paths COMPLEMENT each other. Quicksilver's IMD is a binder that uses lots of thiols on a silica particle in the gut to bind to the bile, guaranteeing that most of it gets out of body. So it would not be insane for someone to be using IMD together with a traditional approach. If you did a conservative low-dose protocol based on Cutler's work together with IMD, you would be maximizing disposal on both pathways.

I have toyed with the idea of using IMD and then closely watching my blood mercury levels for a few months. Once the blood levels come down, then I might add the ALA to help dispose mercury out of the brain. I have reservations about DMSA since it strips normal minerals too. But I may do DMSA. Making all of those decisions soon....

I share one of Pone's reservation though. After reading and using Dr. Andy Cutler's protocol, I too wondered how problematic it would be to take Quicksilver's Nanosphere Vitamin C/R-Lipoate just a few times a day, rather than based on half-life scheduling. It would be interesting to know what Dr. Shade's response would be to the issue of half-life scheduling.

At very least, why doesn't Quicksilver just make a separate liposomal product with ALA and keep the ALA out of other supplements. That way we could use a homeopathic mixture of the Quicksilver product to implement Cutler's protocol. It would give patients a lot of flexibility in how they use ALA. Adding a chelator into a nutritional support product just looks weird to me.

And that is an illustration of how hard this whole detox process is. Even the firm that appears to be the most specialized and knowledgeable in this area still exposes you to risks.

The Tri-Test and IMD products look like no brainers. The rest of Quicksilver's products require research, study, and some decision-making.

 

[pemone]

This is all very interesting and I will look into the Quicksilver products etc... the only problem I see is, even trusting Quicksilver 100% I would still love to have multiple resources on these "new chelators" and some independent verifications.

I wouldn't trust any vendor 100%. The subject is too complex and the research is too sketchy. I would choose the most conservative protocols across multiple vendors, based on your symptoms.

You could probably start IMD to start disposal of organic mercury before amalgams are out.

Follow that with amalgam removal.

Follow that with optionally Cutler's protocol, using (maybe) DMSA and ALA. But it's critical you observe Cutler's guidelines on timing of doses.

 

[Wayne]

The following is an edited post I did on this thread (Lead toxicity and DMSA). It's a thread that contains warnings about doing major "detox". The word detox can sound relatively benign, but initiating major detox is not even close to being benign. It's is a MAJOR undertaking, fraught with many known and unknown dangers.

If you haven't studied this subject for MANY hours, then you should probably hold off on doing this until you've done your homework. Failing to do so has the potential to dramatically (negatively) affect your health in a major way for the rest of your life (not to be overly melodramatic). If you're at all considering doing major detox, you may want to first read this heartbreaking story of a very healthy woman who literally became an invalid from following advice to undertake a "detox" regimine without proper preparation: Robin's Report