Andy Cutler thought that up to 50% of the population of the States has enough mercury in them to cause symptoms. “Oh well,” he told me once in a bemused way, “It is not the first time that the mass poisoning of an entire population has been missed.”
When I was a little girl, I heard that homosexuals, a mysterious and fascinating group, could recognize each other because of hidden cues that ordinary people miss. I don’t know about that, but this is true for mercury-toxic people. Among the myriad other symptoms, the slightly skewed gaze, the “outsiderness,” the awkwardness and eccentricity resonates with something similar in me. After looking at thousands of hair tests, Andy also concluded that toxic people are attracted to other toxic people and get married. “We sure wind up with toxic sweeties” he joked. He didn’t talk about that much, though, because it sounded too weird.
The medical and scientific literature has been packed with information about mercury for hundreds of years. Anybody reading it should suspect mercury in all the “idiopathic” problems that plague us today. The ads that run incessantly on the TV are largely for drugs for the symptoms of mercury poisoning: rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, mental disorders, autoimmune disease are all afflictions that such a complete metabolic poison will cause. David Hammond called his book, The Undiagnosed Epidemic and that about sums things up. Below are a few reasons why mercury is so consistently missed:
1. People get constellations of mercury's over 150 different symptoms. One person might have fibromyalgia and the next bipolar disorder. It’s confusing and hard to grasp that the same thing could cause both these conditions.
2. Mercury is hard to test for. It can start causing problems even 30 years after the original exposure and by that time, it is socked away behind lipid barriers and not available to come out in the blood or the urine. We look for signs of some of the havoc it causes in the patterns of the essential elements on a hair test, but even hair tests are often not informative.
3.There are politics involved. In one lecture Andy said that people get “all emotional” about mercury because the exposures tend to be iatrogenic. At another time he was less mild and called the medical use of mercury, “a breathtaking exercise in criminal irresponsibility.” Dr. Boyd Hayley, who is a research chemist and an academic, said that when he discovered that mercury caused all the symptoms (in vitro) of Alzheimer’s disease and that nothing else did, he thought the NIH was going to back up to his lab with a truck full of money. Instead, his grants weren’t renewed, and he never got any more funding.
4. Mercury toxic people aren’t very good advocates for anything. They can range from being somewhat eccentric to outright mentally ill. Or else they have debilitating and confusing physical problems. Or they have both mental and physical problems. They don’t have energy to go out and lobby and advocate. Even if they did, they are often so eccentric that nobody takes them seriously. Those who have put years into recovering won’t have much motivation for anything other than living the life that they have won back with so much work. Even then they can still have a reputation for being obsessive and weird.
I try not to talk about mercury in my family even though I see people suffering from it every place I look. I saw it when I went to the doctor the other day and the physician’s assistant had what I can only describe as a ‘closed in on herself look.” She was dragging herself around and had a skin condition. I saw it in the little boy at the coop who was laughing uncontrollably and “climbing up the walls." I saw it in the person my age with the tremor struggling with her purse at the cash register. I saw it in a neighbor in the senior housing where I used to live. The army drilled out all his teeth prophylactically and filled them with amalgam. He wound up bipolar in his old age, went off his meds, had a psychotic episode and was shot and killed by the police. I saw it in the memory care place where my brother wound up. It is full of sad, demented old people, filled up with tranquilizers and waiting around to die.
People with too much mercury don’t wind up in our detox community very quickly. They wander from doctor to doctor spending thousands of dollars. (We wrote in The Mercury Detoxification Manual that having a medical file more than an inch thick points to mercury.) Perhaps they think their problem is mold sensitivity and once they fix that they will be better. Or else it is just that they are allergic or sensitive to some food. They try this diet, and then that one. Or else they have chronic Lyme. I have had two clients who spent $85,000 each on special Lyme doctors! All these treatments and strategies help but often not for very long. Andy’s girlfriend, Joann, remarked that it is like alcoholism. People must hit rock bottom before they come to us. They have to exhaust all avenues. There must be “an expert,” they think, or a doctor or somebody with a big reputable company to fix things. Alas, there is not. There is only this boring protocol that you must hunker down and do, repeatedly, for years. It's easy to hurt yourself in this game, too. Our Facebook group has tens of thousands of members, and we constantly hear horror stories from people who tried other detox methods. They inevitably make themselves worse.
Once I asked Andy what I should do about a friend with Parkinson’s disease. He told me to give the information once, and if they hear it somewhere else it might sink in. If you start “babbling away,” he said, you will just drive them off. The concept that half the people around you are poisoned is not a happy one. Many people would rather think that I am nuts than buy into that. It is sad and disorienting to realize that those you are supposed to trust and respect are either totally clueless or have been actively poisoning you. Once the “scales have fallen from your eyes” you can’t put them back, either and you wind up with the marginal rest of us.
“Don’t you believe anything that you have not seen with your own eyes?” my son-in-law asked me in exasperation. No. Sadly, I do not. I don’t believe anything that I read or hear much anymore. But this “don’t know mind” is not the worst place to be. I told Andy that I put everything I hear into an escrow account in my mind and leave it there until I get enough information to decide. He said that was very scientific.
The good news is that the Andy Cutler protocol is a clear and time-tested method for getting “all better” as Andy used to put it. It takes time, but it works. The prognoses for these chronic, iatrogenic, idiopathic diseases are not pretty. Don’t wind up taking a bunch of powerful pharmaceuticals to suppress your immune system or whatever, while a team of doctors supervises your decline and possible death. Buy the book, join the Facebook group, learn how to do low dose, oral chelation, and get "all better" again!