I had a little back and forth with Dr. Chris Exley recently. He is the scientist who has specialized in aluminum and who got some samples of brain tissue from autistic kids and found them to be packed with aluminum. I told Dr. Exley that Andrew Cutler concluded that aluminum is retained in the presence of mercury and that it will come down on its own when you chelate out the mercury. I asked him if he had tested his brain samples for mercury and he said he had not. He said that in his 40 years of studying aluminum that he had never seen any research about its relationship with mercury, and if I knew of any, could I send it to him.
In Hair Test Interpretation Andy describes how he came up with the five statistical tests we apply to hair tests to look for the “deranged mineral transport” that only mercury causes to any extent. Andy’s girlfriend, Joann, who has access to his computers, told me that his observations about how mercury causes the body to retain certain other metals also came from looking at hair tests.
On page 2 in Hair Test Interpretation, Andy explains where all the hair tests he examined came from. He says he compiled information from several alternative doctors who had learned to intuitively connect odd looking hair tests to health problems. Doctors also sent him tests to look at to ask him what he thought. People on internet sites sent him tests. He got to see examples of normal healthy tests when the students at a local medical school all did tests on themselves. 80% of these came back with normal looking mineral transport, but he was able to discuss health histories with the 20% that did not. He saw another 100 tests with detailed health histories from student and staff at another medical school. He got to look at the hair tests for a research study done on autistic children with a control of normal children. Over the twenty years he was doing this he must have seen thousands of hair tests of toxic and healthy people.
He reports in Hair Test Interpretation, also, that it is common to see serial urine tests where mercury stops coming out in significant amounts, but other metals come pouring out at various intermittent times. This occurs, he explains, when enough mercury has been removed from the relevant body compartment to clear the mineral transport protein that handles that particular element. He remarks that which elements will be retained by a particular individual and the order that they will come out is unpredictable. But that particularly arsenic, antimony, nickel, tin and aluminum can get retained because of the mercury to the point where they cause their own signature symptoms. These toxic elements are synergistic with the mercury, which means the combination of symptoms with the mercury is more than the mere sum of their parts. When they start to come out the toxic person can experience significant improvement for this reason.
Robert Kennedy, Jr. keeps pointing out that 50% of our kids suffer from some kind of chronic illness. It is not just autism. Autism, although the worst-case scenario pretty much, is kind of the tip of the iceberg. Other problems the kids get are diabetes, food sensitivities and dangerous allergies, auto immune issues, juvenile arthritis, eczema and cancer Plus all the neurological stuff ranging from Asperger’s, through ADD/ADHD on up until autism. Those are just off the top of my head.
In the Detox Manual we list under the symptoms for aluminum: confusion, poor mental focus, cardiomyopathy, dementia and a trigger for sarcoidosis. But mercury…mercury has hundreds of different symptoms, and people get constellations of these that get given various labels. The symptoms range from indigestion up to psychosis and everything in between. A 2017 journal article which we mention in the Detox Manual states:” the resulting clinical picture can be differently associated to over 250 symptoms involving the neurological, renal respiratory, cardiovascular, hepatic, reproductive and immune systems, with fetotoxicity and genotoxicity in humans” On p 32 in Amalgam Illness, figure 4, Andy has a diagram of all the places mercury interferes in the HPA axis messenger system from the brain, through the hypothalamus, through the pituitary to the adrenal glands, the thyroid, the liver the pancreas, and the gonads. It messes with how this fantastic, crucial chemical messengering system works in ten different places. And that is just one of the systems that it disrupts. Another of course is that it clogs up the transport proteins that allow minerals to move across the cell membranes. It because of this he was able to come up with his “counting rules” to test a hair test for mercury toxicity.
It used to be that all the “product that must not be named” risk aware people thought that the
dysfunction and chronic illness we see in our kids was due to the mercury preservative. Then we got told that “out of an excess of caution” the manufacturers took the mercury out of the pediatric schedule. (Which is for children under 8 years old.) So, it can’t be that anymore, obviously. Now everyone thinks the problem is the aluminum. Mercury is confusing to test for. It will show up low on hair tests, even, when the person is massively toxic. When I see a test with low mercury and high aluminum and the essential minerals that meet Andy’s counting rules for deranged mineral transport, that will confirm mercury in my eyes.
So, I propose that it was mercury, and it still is mercury, that is capable of causing the vast range of dysfunction that our kids are experiencing. Andy said that in his experience, chelating autistic kids for mercury would be all 50% need to recover completely, that another 25% require chelation and some other kind of therapy, and that for the final 25%, who don’t respond, that the problem is something other than mercury. I think in our kids groups we are even getting better results than that. Almost all the little kids that have their hair tests posted by their parents, show the “deranged mineral transport” that only mercury causes. Almost all of them start improving when you chelate them for mercury. The chelators we use do not touch aluminum.
The problem was mercury, and it still is mercury. The aluminum and other metals that the mercury causes the body to retain make everything worse, but the main task at hand is to detox mercury. I don’t know where it is coming from as it was supposed to have been removed from the pediatric schedule. Andy postulated that pediatricians, because they have been told that mercury containing “products that must not be named” are perfectly safe are using adult ones on kids to save money. One thing for sure, though, the little kids in their legions are showing up in our support groups with positive hair tests and mercurial symptoms and they improve when you chelate them for mercury.
I realize that all this is very anecdotal and not very scientific. We don’t keep records in our support groups, and our stories of improvements are based on testimonials. Andy once told me that he was good at getting sick people better and he had decided to put his energy there. But he always emphasized to me that observation is the first step in the scientific method. We certainly have plenty of observation going on, and this French major hopes that some smart, rigorous, actual scientist will take a look at what I talk about here, because it is important!