Andy Cutler Chelation

Andy once commented: “Trained people are arrogant in their ignorance. Educated people are humble in their knowledge.” That was a good description of him.  He was a brilliant and highly educated but rather modest person

Andy majored in physics at the University of California and went on to get a PhD in Chemistry at Princeton University.  He made a career as a consultant in Physics and Chemistry to NASA among other outfits.  He was also a chemical engineer.

Like many of us, Andy got sick from his amalgam fillings.  It started after a dentist placed several filling below the gum line with access to his blood supply.  He described the symptoms he got as: “Inability to concentrate, or to think straight, unable to keep my place while reading, difficulty focusing on distant objects that would come and go, light sensitivity, loss of interest in things, anhedonia (nothing was fun), lack of interest in relating to people, impaired ability to understand them, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, extreme allergy to everything, asthma, intention tremor, depression, periodic weakness in the legs and upper arms, poor judgment, increased emotional volatility, high blood pressure, hearing difficulties and ringing in the ears, low thyroid, low testosterone, excessive urine volume (up to 10 quarts a day - very inconvenient). I could probably think of some more if I put my mind to it.”

He went the usual route of consulting doctor after doctor until he finally got a diagnosis from a person he affectionately referred to as a “voodoo doctor.” This person took a risk in giving the diagnosis and in fact subsequently got in trouble with his medical board.  That is how controversial the subject of chronic mercury poisoning is.  It is controversial because dentists have been implanting the stuff in people’s heads for 150 years and the CDC vaccine schedule is riddled with it.

Although, even as a trained chemist, he had allowed a dentist to put in mercury fillings, and below the gum line at that, he told me that he had never really thought about what this implied.  But he hadn’t done his PhD thesis on chemical kinetics for nothing! He balked when the doctor wanted to give him IV chelation. He focused his considerable intellect and education on the problem.  He could see that what the doctor wanted him to do made no sense.

He did a lot of reading and a lot of self-experimentation to figure out mercury detoxification methods. He always said that it was serendipitous that he had exactly the right background and education to figure this problem out. 

Andy tried pretty much every agent known to bind with mercury on himself and recounted in detail what each one did to him.

One story that particularly struck me was his run-in with a drug called penicillamine, which he read about in the medical literature.  He says about it, “If you just read some medical books as if they were novels, without thinking about any of the underlying physiology, pharmacology or pharmacokinetics and never asked around to find out what happened to real people when they took the stuff you would think it was ‘just what the doctor ordered’ for mercury!

I got a hold of 2 grams of it to do a challenge test and took the first 250 mg capsule. This resulted in a dramatic increase in blood pressure and heart rate, and in losing a lot of coordination and staggering around like Frankenstein for 10 or 15 minutes until I passed out.”

Here is a link where you can read the whole story of his experimentation adventures.

The reactions he had to these experiments he said, were a “wake-up call” that medicine is in fact a technical field that involves giving dangerous chemicals to living human beings and that there is no substitute for identifying, understanding and applying the basic scientific principles behind the use of these chemicals if you want to get better.”  Fortunately, it was something he had the education and training to do.

Pharmacokinetics is the science of how drugs move around and interact in the body.  Andy’s PhD thesis had to do with kinetics so he was able to educate himself about pharmacokinetics.  He was able to figure out a dosing schedule for DMSA and DMPS, both mercury chelators. When he started taking these on their half-life, things got a whole lot smoother.  But DMSA and DMPS are water soluble chelators and can only reach extracellular mercury.  He realized that to chelate out the mercury stuck in his brain and organs, he would need to find a fat-soluble chelator that could pass through cell membranes and the blood brain barrier.

When he was a grad student at Princeton, Andy had a student job working in the chemistry library.  There was a complicated index to chemistry papers that he had mastered to help researchers.  With the help of this index, he located a paper about the chelating properties of the ubiquitous, over-the-counter antioxidant, alpha lipoic acid.  The paper was called Leskova GE. [Protective effect of lipoic acid amide in experimental mercurialism]. Gig Tr Prof Zabol 1979 Jun;(6):27-30, The paper was in Russian. Andy had taken just enough Russian in school to be able to figure out the Cyrillic alphabet and with the help of a Polish friend, they were able to tease out a translation.  It turned out that this over-the-counter antioxidant, which you can buy in pretty much any supermarket in the States, was the fat-soluble chelator he was looking for!

The rest, at least to us, his devotees, is history.  He figured out what the appropriate protocol should be and used it to recover his health.   Afterwards, he spent a lot of time talking to people with mercury problems and many of them tried his approach.  When most of them did quite well, he wrote the book, Amalgam Illness in order to get everything he had learned “out of his head.”  He said he never expected the book to sell but it did.

 “I didn't derive my protocol from on high. I looked stuff up and tried it, talked about it on a listserver (the amalgam.de list) and others tried it as well. After getting large numbers of positive and consistent reports I considered it a protocol and wrote a book about it. I would have considered it shockingly irresponsible to advocate it based solely on theoretical reasoning, without many hundreds of people trying it and talking about it with me.”

Those of us who found our horrible, disabling, and intractable symptoms melting away because of Andy’s instructions regarded him with awe. We idolized him to such an extent that we got accused of being a cult with Andy as our guru. He hated that! He really disliked being idolized. When I got to know him better, he reverted to being an ordinary mortal, albeit a very witty mortal with a ridiculously high IQ. He was a lot of fun to have as a friend.

I stayed with him and his girlfriend Joann for ten days to work on our book. He lived very modestly and in great chaos, in an apartment in a suburb of Seattle. He told me he had to spend three days cleaning up clutter before I came. He also had to readjust his life schedule to accommodate me as he was used to sleeping during the day and staying up all night counseling and admonishing people how to get better.

While I was there, I got to see his “manufacturing facilities,” which was a garage with pallet loads of photocopied pages, and an industrial strength hand stapler. He manufactured Amalgam Illness and Hair Test Interpretation all by himself and mailed them out via the postman who came to his door.  Any business coach would have been horrified.

When asked by a person in one of the groups if he had personally finished with chelating he said, “Probably not. When you are "done" is a flexible concept. I got done enough for life to intervene, but now I think that I need to be more done.” In fact I think he only chelated for a year and a half.  When I stayed at his place he still had allergies and food sensitivities.  And probably heart problems, too, because in 2017 he suddenly died of a heart attack.  We were working on The Mercury Detoxification Manual together at the time and he was just about to book a ticket to come out to Vermont. Everybody who knew him, and that was a whole lot of people all over the world, was devastated.  I didn’t see how I was going to finish the book without him because he had had all the information right there in his head and now it was just like that….gone!  I understood why he said he had written Amalgam Illness to get the information out of his head.  The information was a whole lot safer on paper than in his head! Finally, I comforted myself with the fact that he had talked to many, many people and I was able to use all that dispersed knowledge and help to finish the book.

Andy was particularly kind and helpful to parents with injured children.  I miss him sorely when, on the support groups,  we get questions about genetic disorders or seizure disorders.  He was very knowledgeable and could always suggest something.  He could also tell parents what pitfalls to avoid in the medical system.

When he died, there was a huge number of comments from the public.  I found one post, particularly poignant.  A mother said her son had asked her why she was crying.  She answered, “Because the man who made you better died.”  “Don’t worry mom’, he said, “He’s in heaven and you have the recipe.”