(WHO WAS ANDY CUTLER)
I talk about Andy Cutler all the time and it occurred to me that many people may not even know who he is. Andy was a research scientist, a Phd chemist and chemical engineer, with his degree from Princeton. He got mercury poisoning from his dental work and because his graduate work had to do with kinetics, was able to come up with a mercury chelation protocol that wouldn’t make people horribly, irreversibly worse. He is the author of the two books, Amalgam Illness, Diagnosis and Treatment, and Hair Test Interpretation, Finding Hidden Toxicities. I cowrote a third book, The Mercury Detoxification Manual with him.
When I asked Andy to mentor me, and he said he would, I asked "to what extent?" “Probably to a large extent,” was his reply, "because of all those poor sick people out there.” A Facebook friend and I decided Andy was "an inadvertent arahant.'" "Arahant," from the Buddhist tradition, can be translated as "saint." This would be a person whose job it is to lead people out of suffering. Andy found the remedy for a whole lot of suffering because he got sick himself and had to figure out what to do. I think he would have just as soon continued as a chemical engineer, but he wound up solving everybody's health problems, instead.
I often feel like Cassandra. Cassandra is the character from The Illiad who was blessed by the gods with the ability to tell the future, but then had the curse thrown in that nobody would believe her. You must work on your equanimity in that situation and Andy had done that work. You can’t save everyone. Nevertheless, he was horrified by how easy it was for people to grievously injure themselves by taking a wrong step. He figured out through experience that the only way to get them to listen and stop what they were doing was to yell at them. Feelings got hurt, but too bad! It was better than them getting so sick that they could never recover.
Those of us who found our horrible, disabling, intractable symptoms melting away because of his 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 in an apartment in a suburb of Seattle. He told me 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. He helped untold despairing mothers drag their children back out of autism
I’m glad we got The Detox Manual written. You no longer have to figure out what to do by word of mouth and going here and there on the internet. The book got written, even though Andy up and died! All of us who knew him miss him dreadfully. For sure though, if there is any reward for virtue, he earned it. Perhaps he had an easy time of it in the Bardo and wound up in a happy new life. Or perhaps God met him at the Pearly Gates and said, “Good and faithful servant, well done!”