My Health Problems: A Cautionary Tale (Cutler Protocol, Teeth & ALA)

Spring is coming to Vermont, although it snowed again this morning! The lilac bush outside my window is budding and full of birds, including a particularly stupid robin who keeps throwing himself at the glass, attacking his own image. (I’m sure there is some metaphor to be had here.) Life is racketing along as fast as it can to get through all that procreating before winter sets in again. (I know this is sort of a gloomy way to look at the miracle of spring, but I have been sick a whole lot this winter.)

Winter in Vermont, like old age, is not for sissies. The young people do all right, and my granddaughter is slaloming down hillsides and having a wonderful time, but I am going to be 78 tomorrow and exercise is more of a duty than fun. The elderly in Vermont who can manage it, fly south to Florida like birds. We could have gone to Jamaica, but Steve (aka Bobo, my husband) would have lost his job and have had to start over from zero like the two previous winters.

Usually, it is boring and distressing to listen to people talk about their health. My mother used to call these conversations, “organ recitals” and there is a tradition in my family to shut up about it, like refraining from discussing politics or religion at the dinner table. But my business is coaching people through mercury chelation, so it behooves me to talk about what has been going on in my life regarding that.

About a year and a half ago I started asking myself why I had a diagnosis of chronic lymphocyte leukemia and why, after ten years of chelating with lipoic acid, I still had digestive issues, mostly heartburn and why I still had to take masses of magnesium not to get all kinds of cramps all the time. I wondered if I had lead going on. Lead is stored in the same place that the lymphocytes come from, so that made sense. I had never chelated for lead. I did a hair test to check, and it came back all low in the essential elements, which is positive for the “deranged mineral transport” which only mercury causes.

So, ten years of chelation, doing rounds of 250 mg of lipoic acid every three hours with no side effects, and still positive for mercury! WTF!!? I had a bunch of recent bitewing x-rays and I posted them in the Facebook group. Nikki Lutrell saw a suspicious little fleck in my gum and one of our volunteer dentists confirmed. (Thank you to all our wonderful volunteer dentists who look at people’s x-rays for us!)

People who chelate with amalgam still in their mouth, depending on how much they have, and their physiology, will either get physically sick, make no progress, or make progress for a while and then stall. I am in that latter category.

My current dentist used to work for the local guy who removed everyone’s fillings around here (and who left this situation in my mouth) so he was aware of the implications. He thought it was amalgam, too, and he x-rayed and dug and x-rayed and dug until that little black speck was gone. All well and good. Now I could look forward to a 3-month waiting period to do lipoic acid and possibly the infamous “dump phase.”

The “dump phase” for those who don’t know, is the period where the mercury concentration inside the cell walls is suddenly higher than the mercury concentration outside the cell walls so it (the mercury) starts diffusing out into the blood and you get symptoms. This usually happens after the last exposure to mercury which in most cases is getting your fillings out. This phase can last from a few weeks to a very long time, nobody knows why. Never getting a “dump phase” is suspicious for the dentist not having got everything out of your mouth. I never noticed any dump phase in my saga, but I figured it had happened in “the fog of war” with all the mistakes I made back when I started out.

About the same time as I got the amalgam fragments out of my gums, we moved to a trailer in a park in the country. There was a nasty old carpet in the bedroom that turned out to have mold underneath it. I slept there for 3 months and was exhausted and cranky and much better when I moved out. Steve, who does disaster remediation for a living gutted the whole bedroom down to the studs, removed a bunch of plywood, washed everything down, and rebuilt all the walls and put in a new floor. (He had no reaction to this mold at all, but he said he could smell it.)

Dr. Rafto, from Norway, who is one of the few MDs out there that knows anything at all about chelation, prescribed Nystatin nose drops at this point. He said, “this stuff is oncogenic, so I think you need a little treatment.” I really liked the Nystatin a whole lot. I felt great on Nystatin.

Per the Cutler protocol, there is a three-month waiting period after your last mercury exposure before you can chelate with alpha lipoic acid. This is because when the mercury burden outside the cells is higher than the burden within, because of the concentration gradient across the cell membrane, using a fat-soluble chelator like lipoic acid will carry the mercury the wrong way. During this period, you can use DMSA or DMPS which do not cross the cell walls.

Because I was in this period, I started using DMPS at which point, I broke out in a full body, horrible itchy rash. An itchy rash can be an allergic reaction to DMPS, so you are advised to stop it right away and never take it again. The rash may have been that, or one of those detox reactions that the old naturopaths talk about. I don’t know, but I have no need or desire to find out.

I started using DMSA instead. One of the side effects of DMSA is it can lower your neutrophils and give you yeast flares, which indeed was what happened. One of the blood tests my hematologist ordered for me showed off-the-chart low neutrophils. (Although he didn’t seem to notice or care.) I asked him for a prescription for Nystatin and immediately felt better, a kind of night and day scenario. When it ran out, I asked for a refill which he would not do. It seems Nystatin is only prescribed for thrush and one month is enough of it to cure thrush. “But I don’t have thrush!” I told him, “I have gut dysbiosis: candidiasis.” He didn’t care and I think his overlords would have sanctioned him if he had prescribed this decades old medicine with no side effects for anything other than thrush. I asked the gastroenterologist for a prescription and he wouldn’t prescribe either, although he did apologize for not being able to do so. I asked the GP and they told me to come in for an appointment. When I got there, I met with an officious underling who said that she couldn’t prescribe that without doing “a lot of research,” and that I shouldn’t have bothered to come in. She didn’t ask me anything about what I was experiencing and suggested I go see a naturopath. After that I realized that regular doctors don’t believe in gut dysbiosis. That seems astounding with all the research on this topic these days, but there you are!

I went into around $2,000 in debt seeing various naturopaths. When I went to see the first one, I was so symptomatic that I couldn’t string two words together. I would try to speak and come up completely blank. I think she thought I was a poor old thing with dementia. She gave me a prescription for one month of Nystatin but no more. She wanted me to take either Candidastat by Vitanica or A.C Formula 11 by Pure Encapsulations. These both have berberine and undycylenic acid and a few other things in them. I felt kind of disgruntled about relying on these, but they worked pretty well! Nystatin restored my cognition, and those other products kept me pretty level.

In the meantime, I wanted to go get a vitamin C IV that I had already paid for. The naturopath at that clinic wouldn’t let me do it without first coming in for a $325 fee. But she did spend a whole lot of time with me and suggested I get a GI map, (GI Microbial Assay Plus from Diagnostic Solutions Lab.) I ordered this from Fullscript. It was very informative. There was no candida in my gut at all! There must have been previously, though, because the Nystatin had this night and day effect on me. Instead, I had Blastocystis and a few other pathogens and off the chart low secretory IGA. (I read that Blastocystis is “controversial” which I assume means the MDs don’t believe in that either.) The naturopath prescribed Saccromyces Boulardii which is a probiotic yeast which I believe “crowds out” pathogens. She also prescribed L-glutamine for this secretory IGA thing. I have been taking these and they have been working. Most of the time I feel well although if I get sleep deprived, I fall to pieces.

As an interesting aside, when I got home from the naturopath, I ran all my test results past Chat GPT, and it gave me the same advice as the naturopath had done. I think AI is a terrifically useful tool for navigating all this dysfunction mercury toxicity causes. Don’t use it if you have no idea of what you are doing, but most mercury people, after being sick for so many years, are pretty sophisticated in how to use supplements and other medicines.

After the three-month waiting period was over, I started taking alpha lipoic acid again. Before all this happened, I had been using 250 mg a dose with no side effects. I decided, just to be safe, to reduce the dose to 100 mg. 100 mg made me feel like somebody had directly injected adrenaline into my blood stream. I had a house guest at the time, and she begged me to stop whatever it was I was doing. (I apologize for being the hostess from hell.) I tried 25 mg and that was too much as well. Now I am using 5 mg. So, I have gone from 250mg of lipoic acid with no side effects down to a dose of 5 which is affecting me quite profoundly. I have no explanation for this. Perhaps Andy Cutler would have had something useful to say. I sure miss Andy!

Unrelated to the mercury, around this time I also fell over and slammed my upper thigh into a tree stump. This was not because I was unsteady on my feet but rather because I was floundering around in the deep snow trying to pick up the poop of an enormous dog that I was dog-sitting. This accident put me in a world of pain. Once again, no help at all from my GPs office and I had to go into an Immediate Care where I got prescribed a muscle relaxant that didn’t do anything.

I hope some of you “poor sick people out there,” (as Andy used to say) will find this “organ recital” useful. This thing hits everyone differently but be very, very careful not to make yourself worse. BE SURE TO DO THE DUE DILIGENCE ON YOUR TEETH! I would also like to say that at 78, with all the crap and setbacks and mistakes I have made, if I can keep going, then you can, too!

There are plenty of people who do this protocol and it all goes like a breeze and they can go back to eating McDonalds if they feel like it. But for many of us, this is not an easy path at all. Even when you manage to regain some equilibrium and are no longer miserable you are quite vulnerable and staying healthy can be a full-time job. So don’t make mistakes. (Like I just did.) Take the rules we have laid out to heart. Read and reread the “Do not do list.” Be sure to do the due diligence on your teeth before you start taking any chelators!

I still have “geographic tongue” and some kind of something going on in my sinuses and ears. Chat GPT thinks it is candida and some combination of other stuff. I started a chelation round this morning, and my tongue will look its very worst. I have an appointment with my GP tomorrow for a Medicare checkup. Usually, he wants me to get a colonoscopy, take statins and catch up on my vaccines, but I am taking in my tongue, and a copy of the GI map results. I wonder what he will say.