In the mercury poisoned community, and it is an exceedingly large community, we are confused why this obvious and very common toxicity is hardly ever diagnosed although there are a good 150 years of medical and scientific literature on the topic.
In a 2017 article in The International Journal of Environmental Health, the authors, referring to mercury poisoning, stated, “the resulting clinical picture can be differently associated to over 250 different symptoms, involving the neurological, renal, respiratory, cardiovascular, hepatic, reproductive and immune systems, with fetotoxicity and genotoxicity in humans.” That covers every organ system in your body. Other poisons just do one or two things, but mercury causes more than 250 symptoms.
People who have this problem don’t get all these symptoms at once, obviously. They get, rather, what I like to call constellations of some of them. How this will manifest depends on how susceptible the person is, where the poison wound up in their body, how much they got, when they got it and so forth. The symptoms come and go and change and the illness is progressive. Doctors are trained about acute mercury poisoning, but you rarely see that nowadays. This is a slow and accumulating poisoning from small exposures over time.
Some people got exposed as children and only spin into disfunction 30 years later. My own example is a good one. I probably got some mercury in utero from my mother, who had a lot of dental work. Then my siblings and I got more vaccines than most kids because my family travelled. Then I must have got my first amalgam filling at age 8 or something like that. Then more vaccines and more fillings over the years. When I came back to the States in the eighties from living in India, a dentist drilled out 8 or 10 fillings and put in new amalgam. Not being able to secrete mercury very well, runs in families, too, and I think mine is particularly susceptible. I also had Hep C and Andy said that people who have even had a past case of hepatitis will accumulate mercury 3 times faster.
The problems in my case developed slowly and in fits and starts. I started to live with feeling anxious and depressed and tired, having my digestion rather strange, and by sixty my cognition started to falter. Mine was a sort of classic progression. This thing doesn’t kill many or most people very quickly. People continue mad as hatters and nutty as fruitcakes well into old age. Or, on a grimmer note, they suffer awful physical and neurological and psychiatric symptoms well into old age. And nobody puts two and two together. All their symptoms get treated on a separate basis.
Once, while visiting my sister in Berkeley, California, I had an epiphany about my brother-in-law, who is a psychiatrist. I told my friend, "I bet 50% of his patients are toxic with mercury. " “50%!” she replied, “It’s more like 90!” I emailed Andy and asked, and he agreed, "it was more like 90.”
Psychological symptoms range from being eccentric, to having anxiety and depression up to having a diagnosed case of something serious, like obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. Many toxic people have been on anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication at some point in their lives and some of them wind up on mood stabilizers or anti-psychotic medications.
Andy said once that when you are mercury toxic yourself, because of subtle, psychological cues, you can spot another toxic person across a crowded room. In our community, we have come up with a couple of archetypal personalities that we associate with this toxicity. We labeled the male archetype “the lone wolf.” He is like the 38-year-old son of your neighbor who lives in her basement, can’t hold a job even though he has an advanced degree, has difficulty with his relationships and spends all his time playing video games and researching conspiracy theories or his medical symptoms. Almost everybody knows somebody like that.
Women get affected differently. My aunt comes to mind. She was a lovely person, but terribly eccentric. She had a bad tremor, her anxiety was through the roof, and she was always obsessed with one crackpot scheme or other. She lived into her nineties by the way.
Andy used to say, “you are not crazy, you are poisoned.” I hope that will provide some comfort for toxic people who suffer from mental illness.
Some people’s toxicity manifests as neurological problems instead of or along with psychological ones. They can develop Parkinson’s disease, ALS, MS, tremors, neuropathy, seizures, poor memory and/or impaired thinking. They often develop Alzheimer’s and other dementias as they get older. A classic mercury symptom is an intention tremor. Their hands shake when they pick up a glass, their handwriting becomes more and more difficult to read. I think my father had Asperger’s syndrome, although he never got a diagnosis. He had an intention tremor and his handwriting got more and more unreadable as he got older. His tremor took over more of his body, too. (He was addicted to neo-synephrine nose drops by the way. At the time, these were preserved with thimerosal.)
Brain fog is a common symptom. Andy described it as feeling like a hangover without the pain. I describe it as feeling like you are constantly in danger of rear-ending someone on the road. Short term memory goes downhill. People often find themselves going into a room and wondering what they came in for, a “senior moment.” There may be problems with concentration. The mind wanders and jumps about. Simple things like organizing a few papers become difficult. You must read a paragraph several times before it will sink in, because you forget the beginning before you get to the end.
The body has feedback loops from the blood to the brain with enzymes and hormones zapping around doing things. Mercury interferes with the body’s delicate and complicated hormone regulating systems and it disables crucial enzymes. Perhaps it has poisoned the pituitary and hypothalamus which are supposed to be measuring things and sending out these chemical messages. Or it may have directly poisoned the hormone producing glands. The thyroid may have stopped working properly, and the person is on meds. The adrenals are compromised and don't produce enough cortisol, or too much at the wrong times. There is a spoke in the wheels. A few teeth are missing from a cog wheel. Things works but not very well.
Fatigue is pretty universal. One reason for this can be direct poisoning of the liver. At its worse there is chronic fatigue perhaps with fibromyalgia, two famous idiopathic conditions! The circadian rhythm gets screwed up and people can’t sleep, or sleep at the wrong times or sleep too much. Vision, hearing and/or sense of smell may be affected. The person may have to follow along with their finger to read as they lose their place or can’t focus their eyes. Loud noises make them jump. (You often will notice this in toxic children.)
There is leaky gut, dysbiosis, yeast overgrowth, indigestion, chemical sensitivities and allergies. Some people can’t walk down the chemical aisle in the supermarket without fainting. I have heard that called the ‘full bucket syndrome.” You are so full of toxins that one more damn thing will make you faint! Toxic people often come to us after being on every kind of diet trying to control symptoms.
Toxic people often pee too much. They wake up multiple times at night to go to the bathroom. This can be diabetes insipidus and is because mercury is diuretic. If you have been to the doctor for this and found no infection, the docs will inevitably test you for diabetes. You may HAVE diabetes as mercury interferes with the way your body handles sugar.
The immune system gets affected. Toxic people get parasites and yeast, viruses and bacterial infections. In the worst case scenario, the immune system attacks the body itself causing autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis or lupus. I will give the example here of a lady I worked with when I was a caregiver. She started off with loss of feeling in her feet which her doctors diagnosed as peripheral neuropathy, and then loss of balance which they decided to call multiple sclerosis. She wound up in a wheelchair and was eventually bedridden and moved around in a Hoyer lift. She was put on methotrexate and a host of other powerful pharmaceuticals with horrible side effects and her care was expensively managed by a team of doctors during her long and unhappy decline into death. There are many diseases of unknown origin that may very well “just be mercury," Alzheimer’s, ALS, Parkinson’s disease and how many more? So if you have a chronic disease with a grim prognosis, and for which nobody knows the cause, look closely at the possibility of mercury poisoning. Mercury poisoning is curable, whereas these diseases rarely are. Don’t condemn yourself to taking powerful drugs with terrible side effects while you decline, suffer and die. Chelate with this protocol instead and get better!
Andy and I put together a list of odd, non-medical things which we thought were diagnostic for mercury poisoning. Just being here listening to me speak is pretty diagnostic, by my lights anyway. But the list is as follows:
1. you have been told by your doctor to see a therapist when you were obviously physically ill.
2. You have a medical file more than an inch thick.
3. You have a cupboard bursting with supplements and medicines.
4. You have multiple, seemingly unrelated things wrong with your health.
5. You have consulted multiple doctors and other practitioners without much progress.
6. You have tried all kinds of diets and cleanses and protocols but still are not well.
7. You have been told you have "somatization disorder."
Don't take my word for it! As I said, this list of afflictions is common knowledge and is all over the medical and scientific literature. Here is an article I found on the internet.
If you have got to the end of this and thought to yourself, “Boy that sounds like me,” then you probably have more mercury in your body than is good for you. So, chelate and get better. This thing only gets worse. The prognosis is not good, it does not get better on its own. Don’t go on to get dementia when you are elderly, or whatever other little gift this problem has in store for you. Chelate with the Andy Cutler protocol and get back your birthright: good health and a happy disposition.
Please like and share and all those good things. Andy said in a resigned sort of way that this would not be the first time that there has been a mass poisoning, and nobody noticed. Let’s see if we can change that.
Here is the video version of this article.