2 WHAT MERCURY POISONING LOOKS LIKE
Cyanide and carbon monoxide block the hemoglobins ability to carry oxygen. Ozone destroys the lining of your lungs. Hexavalent chromium oxidizes your DNA. All the plastics and plasticizers in the environment are estrogen mimics and agonize or antagonize one of a handful of estrogen receptors in your body. But mercury is different from ordinary poisons. It doesn’t just harm you in one way. Mercury interferes with a vast number of fundamental metabolic processes. It causes hundreds of different symptoms and any individual may experience some or a great many of these at any time.
A 2017 journal article about mercury poisoning 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.” 1
If you have mercury poisoning you will experience a constellation of different symptoms depending on your own individual biochemistry. Which symptoms show up will depend on how susceptible you are, where the poison wound up in your body and how much of it you have. The illness is progressive and the symptoms may come and go, or change.
1 Virginia Andreoli and Francesca Sprovieri, “Genetic Aspects of Susceptibility to Mercury Toxicity: An Overview”.
Int J. Environ Res. Public Health
2017, 14 ,93; doi: 10.3390/ijerphl4010093
It may take years or decades for the symptoms to develop into a case of frank mercury poisoning.
With most other poisons, you will be treated and you will either recover or die. With chronic mercury poisoning, oddly, you will probably not die right away. Instead, you will probably live a long and miserable life of chronic illness, missed opportunities, unsatisfactory relationships and financial difficulties.
Doctors are trained to be aware of the symptoms of acute mercury poisoning (such as you would receive from an industrial accident) but they rarely diagnose chronic mercury poisoning. Chronic poisoning is a slow and cumulative exposure, as from the mercury evaporating from amalgam fillings, a predilection for tuna fish salad sandwiches and sushi, and a yearly flu vaccination to top off the dose.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website says chronic mercury poisoning causes signs and symptoms such as:
• irritability
• shyness
• tremors ,
• changes in vision or hearing
• memory problems
• depression
• numbness and tingling in the hands, feet or around the mouth
The only problem is that they have no recommendations for when and how to check for this chronic poisoning. Did you ever hear of a doctor checking a depressed person, or a shy person, or a person with a tremor for mercury? Even if you have an obvious case of mercury poisoning, you may well have to figure it out for yourself.
2.1 Psychological symptoms
Mercury poisoning also causes psychological problems and personality changes which has been understood and written about for centuries. The most famous studies observed workers in the hat making industry at the turn of the eighteenth and again at the end of the nineteenth century. This profession made people mentally ill, or “mad as a hatter,” for a couple of hundred years, yet nobody checks mentally ill people for mercury anymore.
The hatters got small, chronic exposures from the mercury salts used in the manufacture of felt. They were reported to have reddish complexions, to often blush and to be timid and full of vague fears. They would grow inappropriately irritated and often lose their jobs because they couldn’t take orders. Their symptoms ranged from melancholia to “manic-depressive insanity” and suicidal tendencies. They suffered from insomnia and bad dreams. A syndrome was identified and given the label “erethism mercurialis.”
Nowadays, these symptoms would be diagnosed as a mental disorder and the sufferer sent for psychiatric care.
Mercury poisoning produces personalities that may at first glance seem more eccentric than actually toxic. Take a look at your neighbor’s 38-year-old son who lives in her basement and can’t keep a job. Why can’t he function in society even though he has an advanced degree? How come he spends all his time playing video games and researching conspiracy theories and his medical symptoms? Or what about your wildly eccentric mother-in-law with the terrible tremor? She is half crippled with anxiety and has been dithering around with one crackpot scheme or another for her whole life. There they are, poisoned people, out in plain sight, but nobody thinks anything of it. They are passed off as a bunch of peculiar or eccentric types—obsessives, who can be boring, pedantic and repetitive. There they go again, droning on about their fixations!
As the poisoned person becomes more toxic, the disease progresses and psychological symptoms may develop into an outright mental illness such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Many toxic people have been on anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication at some point in their lives. Some of them wind up on anti-psychotic or mood stabilizing medications.
Others need these medications but refuse to take them. Perhaps they self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. Or perhaps the toxicity has made them angry and emotionally volatile. Their increasingly short temper has driven away their friends and family.
2.2 Neurological symptoms
Some peoples brains manifest neurological problems instead of, or as well as, psychiatric problems. They may develop Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), multiple sclerosis (MS), tremors, neuropathy, seizures, poor memory or impaired thinking. As they age, they may descend into Alzheimer’s disease. Or they may, like half of all neurology patients, never get any diagnosis at all although their symptoms vary from miserable to disabling. As one woman’s neurologist told her, “The good news is you don’t have MS, ALS or Parkinson’s Disease. The bad news is we don’t know what you have.”
A classic mercury symptom is an intention tremor. This is a tremor that shows up when the person is attempting a deliberate and visually guided movement. Their hands shake when they pick up a fork or glass. Their handwriting becomes more and more difficult to read. Typing becomes difficult. It becomes hard to dial the phone without mistakes. There can be a tremor in the lips that leads to unclear diction. Over the course of the disease, these tremors can develop into a full body tremor.
The list of psychological and neurological symptoms is long. Brain fog develops. This is an inability to concentrate which feels like a hangover without the pain. Short-term memory is lost. The person may come into a room and stand perplexed having forgotten their reason for being there. They may not be able to find their car in the parking lot without standing and thinking for a minute. They may ask their spouse something they asked five minutes ago and think they are just having a “senior moment.”
Mercury can cause attention deficit where, for instance, organizing a pile of papers becomes terribly perplexing. Simple things like balancing checkbooks or making routine telephone calls become dreaded tasks. Academic work, which used to be easy, becomes difficult. The person has to read paragraphs over and over as their mind wanders, or they forget the beginning by the time they get to the end.
A toxic person’s days seem a whole lot shorter than other people’s. Much time is spent being tired, unfocused and disorganized. Time and energy is lost looking for misplaced objects. Tasks are repeated or picked up again after they have been dropped and forgotten in mid-stream.
2.3 Physical symptoms
Mercury also causes a full measure of physical symptoms. Fatigue is universal. Some people have such crushing fatigue that they are bed-ridden and can no longer function. They also frequently have aches and pains that may be severe enough to be diagnosed as fibromyalgia.
Toxic people lose control of their circadian rhythm. They have a hard time getting up in the morning and a hard time going to sleep at night. They may develop insomnia. They never feel refreshed or rested. They may wake up every few hours all night. Sometimes they wake up with a start at three in the morning and can’t go back to sleep. They may fall asleep during the day at inappropriate times.
Their vision, hearing or sense of smell may be affected. There can be alterations in color perception. The person finds it difficult to focus on distant objects. While reading, the words seem to swim around on the page and they lose their place. They have to run a finger under the lines when they read large blocks of text. Loud noises make them jump. Their sense of smell diminishes or disappears.
Toxic people’s intestinal flora gets out of balance. They suffer from dysbiosis and yeast overgrowth, leaky gut and indigestion. They have food sensitivities and food allergies. They may develop multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) where they can’t walk down a detergent aisle in the supermarket without fainting because of the smells. They often try one diet or another, or one cleanse after another to fix these issues.
Mercury is diuretic. It directly poisons the kidneys as well as those areas of the brain that control how the kidneys work. Toxic people wake up all night to urinate. They produce more urine than normal and it is light colored. If they do not drink they continue to urinate and become very thirsty and dehydrated. Women may think they have a urinary tract infection but the urinalysis is negative. At some point their doctor might suspect diabetes.
Their metabolism gets disrupted and their internal thermostat stops working properly. Mercury victims often feel either too hot or too cold, or they go back and forth between the two. Many complain that they have stopped being able to sweat, others that they sweat too much.
Mercury scrambles the brain’s delicate hormone-regulating systems and directly poisons the hormone-producing glands. The thyroid stops working properly. The adrenal glands are affected as well. People find themselves dragging around without energy, relying on stimulants like coffee and sugar to make it through the day. Their temperature is low, their blood pressure is low (or conversely too high) and many gain weight no matter how disciplined they try to be. Healthy libido becomes a thing of the past. Women may have painful menstruation. Men may suffer from low testosterone.
Mercury interferes with the immune system. Toxic people have a perennial problem with yeast overgrowth, viruses, bacterial infections and parasites because those aspects of the immune system that control these things have been compromised. In the worst-case scenario, the immune system starts attacking the body itself, causing autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis or lupus .
Groups of symptoms wind up being mislabeled as some disease or other: lupus, or multiple sclerosis, or irritable bowel syndrome or just chronic fatigue syndrome. The “diagnosis” confers a name but nobody knows what causes it. It is ‘idiopathic,’ and by the way, there is no cure. There are only drugs to control symptoms.
Thus, a lady who Rebecca knew personally, started off with loss of feeling in her feet, which the doctors diagnosed as peripheral neuropathy, then loss of balance which they decided to call multiple sclerosis. She wound up in a wheelchair and eventually was confined to a bed and moved around with a Hoyer lift. She was put on Methotrexate, and a host of other drugs with horrible side effects. Her care was expensively managed by a team of doctors during her long and miserable decline into death.
There are many diseases of unknown origin that can “just be mercury”. These include multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinsons disease and many more. If you have a chronic disease for which nobody knows the cause, look closely at the possibility of mercury poisoning. Mercury poisoning is curable, whereas these chronic diseases rarely are. Don’t condemn yourself to taking expensive drugs with terrible side effects while you suffer and die. Chelate instead and get better!
You may very well have mercury poisoning if any of the following are true:
• you have been told by a doctor to see a therapist when you were obviously physically ill
• you have a medical file more than an inch thick
• you have a cupboard bursting with supplements and medicines
• you have consulted multiple doctors and other practitioners without much progress
• you have tried all kinds of different diets and cleanses
Figure 2.1 Typical cupboard
Do you have a cupboard that looks like this in your house? You could be a self-indulgent, crazy hypochondriac. Or you could be mercury poisoned.
Reading this book may well be diagnostic. If you didn’t have mercury poisoning, doctors would have fixed you up by now and this book would not hold your interest.
So, if you have read this description and recognized yourself, you probably have chronic mercury poisoning. Many people do. We wrote this book so you can get better. Don’t spend the rest of your life feeling sick. The cure for mercury poisoning is appropriate chelation. Chelating takes a long time and is tedious—but it is worth it to reclaim your birthright: good health and a happy disposition.
This discussion has touched on some of the symptoms and problems caused by mercury. There are more. You can read about them in Amalgam. Illness or Hair Test Interpretation. You can also read about them online at www.noamalgam.com/ai.html by clicking on the link, “What mercury poisoning does to you.”
You get mercury…
maybe from your doctor
maybe from your dentist
maybe from your dinner
maybe from the air
maybe it makes you not able to pay attention
maybe it makes you not able to remember things
maybe it makes your brain go on strike
maybe it makes you go cross-eyed
maybe it makes you itch all over
maybe it makes you depressed
maybe it makes you not sleep
maybe it makes you anxious
maybe it makes you tired
maybe it makes you allergic
maybe it makes you crazy
maybe it makes you confused
maybe it makes you pee too much
maybe it makes you easy to sunburn
maybe it makes your stomach act up
maybe it makes your thyroid go on strike
maybe it makes you adrenal glands go on strike
maybe it makes you unable to walk and keep your
balance
No maybe about it, mercury makes you miserable!
1
Available at www.noamalgam.com .
For example, see www.dmpsbackfire.com , or cutlersuccessstories.weebly.com/what-not-to-do.html.
Available at www.FightAutismAndWin.com
www.health.state.mn.us/divs/eh/hazardous/ topics/mercury/hgflooringprofguide.html
Autoimmune diseases are paradoxically more common in people with an immune deficiency.