4 HOW TO TEST FOR CHRONIC MERCURY POISONING

Mercury hides away in the brain and other organs. It is impossible to measure it without biopsies after death. Blood tests are misleading, as mercury will only stay in the blood for a few months after an acute exposure. If you have a long-term exposure such as amalgam fillings, blood and urine levels can be low while organ levels are dramatically elevated. There is no test you can use to see how much mercury you have. You can’t monitor your progress by chelating for a few months and then test again to see how much has been removed. You must use symptoms as your guide.

In any case, you do not have to do tests to find out if you have mercury, because everybody has some. The real question is, do you have too much mercury. Do you have enough mercury, and in the right places, to interfere with your biochemistry and make you sick?

If you are amalgam free you can test yourself for mercury with a therapeutic trial of chelation. You must not chelate with amalgams in your mouth! Most people are not lucky enough to be amalgam free. In that case a hair test can be informative. There is also a checklist on pages 56 to 61 of Amalgam Illness: Diagnosis and Treatment which you can use to evaluate yourself for mercury poisoning. This checklist uses laboratory abnormalities that can show up on tests you may already have in your medical records.

4.1    If you don’t have mercury fillings: a trial of chelation

If you are lucky, you don’t have any amalgam fillings in your mouth. In this case, you can answer the question of whether you have mercury (or something else chelatable) quite easily. A therapeutic trial of chelation is the “acid test.” Any reaction, good or bad, to alpha lipoic acid is proof of toxicity with mercury, arsenic or antimony. To check for lead you will need to use DMSA. We suggest ten trial rounds, but be sure to follow the rules for chelating safely when you try this! (See section 7.2)

Try a few rounds of chelation with alpha lipoic. Start at 25 mg and double the dose with each new round, until you either hit 200 mg every three hours without feeling anything, or until you get side effects.

2 If you get any kind of side effect, it means you have something that alpha lipoic acid chelates. You may feel tired, cranky and depressed or have aches and pains, particularly the day after the round. A few people feel euphoria during the round. This method of testing will give you a definitive answer as to whether you are toxic or not. Ten rounds should be enough to ascertain if you need to chelate. If you have nothing to chelate, nothing will happen. If you have something to chelate, you will get a reaction.

4.2    If you have mercury fillings: a hair test

If you are unable to do trial rounds of chelation because you have fillings, the most useful test for toxicity is a suitable hair test. The examples in Hair Test Interpretation are Hair Elements tests from Doctors Data, Inc. Be careful to order the correct hair test from Doctors Data as there are two. You want the one that has both a toxic and an essential elements section. This is the test referenced on web page www.doctorsdata.com/ hair-elements/ at the Doctor’s Data website. (You do not want the test labeled “Hair Toxic Element Exposure Profile” found at www.doctors-data.com/hair-toxic-element-exposure-profile/)

Either a doctor must order this test for you, or you can order it on your own through an online service such as Direct Labs.

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Laboratories that offer suitable tests to check for mercury include: Doctors Data, Inc., Great Plains Laboratory, Inc. and Rocky Mountain Analytical. Trace Elements, Inc. (TEI), operating as Interclinical, is suitable for adults

4 , but you may have a hard time interpreting it as the format is different.

  

4.2.1 How to interpret a hair test  

Interpreting a hair test is not straightforward. Most practitioners do it incorrectly. The level of any element in your hair does not necessarily reflect the amount you have in your body. Very toxic people often have low mercury on the test leading them to think that they don’t have a problem.

A hair test is positive for mercury when the patterns in the essential elements section indicate “deranged mineral transport.” This situation is caused by mercury preventing your body from getting the right minerals to where they belong. Only mercury can do this and it is one of the ways it makes you sick

5 . Deranged mineral transport doesn’t answer the question of how much mercury you have in your body. It does let you know there is enough to interfere with your basic biochemical processes and make you sick.

Andy has put together five statistical tests for deranged mineral transport, called the “counting rules.” If your hair test meets any one of the counting rules, then you have enough mercury in your body to be a problem.

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Sometimes you can get a hair test that shows very high mercury. This would also be a positive-for-mercury test. If you have this situation, your doctor might even believe what you are saying.

It is also possible to be toxic and have a perfectly normal looking hair test. This can happen if your exposure happened years in the past or you are doing an excellent job taking care of your health. (Anything that makes you feel better will make the hair test look better.) If this is the case and you have no amalgams, a therapeutic trial of chelation will let you know if you are toxic with mercury or not.

A hair test can also give some useful information about adrenal and thyroid function and whether you may have an issue with some toxic metal other than mercury.

  

4.2.2 How to apply the “counting rules” to the “Essential and Other Elements” section of a Doctors’ Data hair test

The counting rules are easiest to apply using a Doctors Data Toxic and Essential Elements Hair Test. The first step is to check that the name, age and sex are recorded correctly. Normal ranges are age and sex dependent. If those are wrong the test will have to be recalculated.

The test has two sections. The top section is “toxic elements.” The bottom section is “essential and other elements.” You apply the counting rules to the bottom, or “essential and other elements” section.

When your test meets a counting rule, mineral transport is deranged. You can’t rely on the levels of the toxic elements in the top section of the test. You ignore them. They have no meaning. The mercury level on the test will typically show low, even though you know you are toxic because you have met a counting rule.

A normal and orderly test will look well balanced in the middle of the chart. There will typically be about 15 in the white and green zones, about 6 into the yellow and possibly one into the red.

With normal, orderly, mineral transport, the bars in the toxic element section represent the amounts in your body. Those that stick out into the red are significant, except for uranium and titanium, which simply aren’t very toxic. A yellow range lead result can be significant because lead is very toxic. Other yellow range results seldom mean anything.

When mineral transport is somewhere between normal and deranged, you will have to make a judgment call as to whether the toxic element section results are meaningful or not. In this case, Hair Test Interpretation is useful to evaluate symptoms. Alternatively, you can go online and find internet groups devoted to frequent dose chelation and ask for help with your hair test.

Below is a quick summary of how to interpret a hair test:

Table 4.1

How to apply the counting rules _

1.    Five or fewer bars from the middle white zone going right meets a counting rule.

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2.    Five or fewer bars going left from the middle white zone meets a counting rule.

3.    Four or more bars extending into the red zone either right or left meets a counting rule.

4.    Eleven or fewer in the white and green zones (not touching the yellow) meets a counting rule.

5.    Missing any two of the above rules by one bar meets a counting rule.