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► What is in the book?
► Back cover copy
► Problems mercury can cause
► Table of contents
► Excerpts from the book
► Medicine, controversy and mercury
► Mainstream versus alternative medicine
► What mercury poisoning does to you
► Overview of treatment
► What to expect – prognosis
Amalgam Illness: Diagnosis and Treatment
A book on how to cure mercury poisoning
by Andrew Hall Cutler, PhD, PE
ISBN: 9780967616834
A wide variety of debilitating and supposedly incurable conditions may actually be due to chronic mercury poisoning. Mercury poisoning can be easily cured if it is recognized. These conditions are seldom cured because mercury poisoning is believed to be rare. It is not. It is quite common. Thus, many people suffer needlessly.
Many of today’s “mystery syndromes” that physicians don’t know how to treat at all – fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, anorexia, recurrent depression – aren’t mystery syndromes. They are just mercury poisoning. Treating them as mercury poisoning cures them, while the usual treatments are seldom effective in the long term.
This book gives practical guidance on how to tell if you really have chronic mercury poisoning or some other problem. If mercury poisoning is your problem, the book tells you how to get the mercury out of your body, and how to feel good while you do that.
Sections also explain how the scientific literature shows many people must be getting poisoned by their amalgam fillings, why such a regulatory blunder occurred, and how the debate between “mainstream” and “alternative” medicine makes it more difficult for you to get the medical help you need.
Most of the book is devoted to what you can do to treat the symptoms of amalgam illness while you get rid of your mercury. The treatment section gives step by step directions to figure out exactly what mercury is doing to you and how to fix it. You can feel better soon. This book tells you how.
Amalgam Illness: Diagnosis and Treatment was written by a research chemist who himself got mercury poisoning from his amalgam dental fillings. He found that there was no suitable educational material for either the patient or the physician. Knowing how much people can suffer from this condition, he wrote this book to help them get well fast.
What is in the book?
Amalgam Illness: Diagnosis and Treatment starts with a detailed explanation of why to consider amalgam illness to be something that some people must have by comparing the well known statistics for how much mercury people absorb from their fillings to the well known statistics of how sensitive different members of a population are to a given toxin. This is for people who really don’t know if they believe in amalgam illness or not (the other material available is rather sensational and I can’t blame anyone reading it for having questions) before going any further.
Amalgam Illness: Diagnosis and Treatment discusses how to deal with physicians if you think you have a controversial disease – especially if you have the great “luck” to be covered by a managed care plan.
A key section is devoted to diagnosis – how to tell if you actually have amalgam illness instead of something else. It is also possible to be mercury poisoned from something other than amalgam, and the testing and examination described here is diagnostic regardless of the source.
How to get the dental work done safely if you have decided amalgam fillings are the problem is briefly described – there is a robust industry of amalgam free dentists if you know how to look for them. The use of drugs and nutritional supplements to get the mercury out of your system is carefully presented- there are some important factors here that are not well described in the previous books on the subject and not all physicians who claim they know what to do actually give good advice.
Then comes what turns out to be the major section of the book – how to treat all the related health conditions amalgam illness can cause so as to relieve them while mercury detoxification proceeds. Since amalgam illness is not widely recognized in the medical community, most people with it get pretty sick before they get motivated to bounce around between doctors and eventually end up in front of one who tells them about it. So most victims have pretty serious, unpleasant health problems (like fibromyalgia or severe allergies) and they really need to make these STOP for the year or two it can take to get fully detoxed and let your body heal.
There are extensive tables of what to use for different conditions, a description of all the drugs and nutritional supplements suggested in the book, and appendices covering things like what the assorted clinical laboratory tests you might get actually mean, what other helpful books are that you might use, and supporting information like what the chelating agents are and how they work.
Back cover copy
This book explains how the modern epidemic of disabling, incurable chronic diseases is due to unrecognized mercury poisoning. Many conditions, from Parkinson’s disease and autism – widely recognized as terrible afflictions – to those like chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia which, though equally serious, are disparaged as “Yuppie flu” can be undiagnosed mercury poisoning. The book explains WHY mercury poisoning is so widespread, yet seldom diagnosed. Proper diagnostic procedures are given so that sick people can decide what is wrong rather than trying random treatments. This book explains how to cure chronic mercury poisoning, what to do to control the problems it causes, and provides the real technical information needed for diagnosis and treatment in a straightforward manner. This down to earth book lets patients take care of themselves. It also lets doctors who are not familiar with chronic mercury intoxication treat it. The book is a practical guide to getting well.
Problems mercury can cause
Mercury can cause a bewildering variety of problems. In fact, one of the major criticisms of amalgam illness is that it is cited as the cause of so many things. But, like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, mercury can indeed cause many diseases. Modern physicians are not trained to find the root cause of a sick person’s problems. They are trained to translate what they see into latin, look it up in their textbook, and apply a cookbook treatment. With a toxin that poisons fundamental metabolic processes different people will experience different symptoms to start off, depending on their own individual biochemistry. As the poisoning becomes more and more serious, further symptoms surface and the modern doctor adds more diagnoses – a patient who starts with depression might later be considered to have hypothyroidism, allergies and asthma in addition. But no thought is given to why one person should develop more and more “diseases,” when a single diagnosis – chronic mercury poisoning – could account for them all.
Some of the “diseases” a modern physician might mistakenly misdiagnose chronic mercury poisoning as are:
- Addison’s disease
- Gastritis
- Allergies
- Hypogonadism
- Alzheimer’s’ disease
- Hypothyroidism
- Amylotrophic lateral sclerosis
- Infertility
- Ankylosing spondylitis
- Insomnia
- Anorexia nervosa
- Irritable bowel syndrome
- Anxiety
- Juvenile arthritis
- Asthma
- Learning disabilities
- Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
- Lupus erythromatosus
- Autoimmune disease
- Manic depression
- Bipolar disorder
- Multiple chemical sensitivities
- Borderline personality disorder
- Multiple sclerosis
- Bulimia
- Myasthenia gravis
- Candidiasis
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder
- Chronic fatigue
- Panic attacks
- Colitis
- Parkinson’s disease
- Crohn’s disease
- Pervasive developmental disorder
- Depression
- Psychosis
- Endocrine disorders
- Rheumatoid arthritis
- Environmental illness
- Schizophrenia
- Fibromyalgia
- Sciatica
- Food allergies
- Sleep disorders
- Yeast syndrome
Table of contents
- Introduction
- Medicine, controversy and mercury
- Why worry about mercury poisoning?
- What mercury poisoning does to you
- Do you have it? How to diagnose mercury poisoning
- What to do about mercury poisoning
- What to take for mercury poisoning
- Descriptions of stuff you can take (Materia medica)
- Appendix
- Index
Excerpt from the Book: Medicine, controversy and mercury
This is not the first time in the history of modern medicine that a very obvious disease was belittled and ignored. Until recently it was believed that ulcers were entirely psychosomatic. Ulcer sufferers underwent prolonged treatment, were seldom cured, and often ended up under the surgeon’s knife. After years of intense criticism and ridicule – about 20 years after the research was published – it has finally been accepted that most ulcers are due to helicobacter pylorii infection which can be easily cured with appropriate antibiotic therapy. At least by the medical schools and licensing boards. Yet it is still common to find physicians who still treat ulcers by prescribing acid suppressors – as if they resulted from too much stomach acid.
Cholesterol was held out as the root cause of atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease for about 30 years during which the correct evidence that elevated homocysteine played a major role was ridiculed and ignored.
Older physicians still remember when “there was no such thing as Epstein Barr Virus (mononucleosis).”
And who can forget Lyme disease? A housewife fell ill. Her arthritis and other symptoms were diagnosed as psychosomatic. When her husband and children came down with similar symptoms, this was regarded as some kind of projection of her psychosomatic complaint. She was eventually able to convince physicians that the only crazy thing was assuming that something psychosomatic could be contagious!
Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome is still routinely considered a psychiatric disorder despite the repeated publication of physical and laboratory abnormalities always found in victims of it. When it can no longer be ignored, it is dismissed with a bit of namecalling – “Yuppie flu.”
And in less recent times, another form of mercury poisoning – acrodynia – was endemic for 150 years until physicians recognized mercury as the causal agent. The disease was promptly eliminated by changing the formulation of certain infant care products.
Excerpt from the Book: Mainstream versus alternative medicine
It is common for two conflicting but legitimate segments of the medical community to be at odds as to the methods for diagnosing and treating certain conditions. Where there is more than one recommended method of diagnosis or therapy and none of them are used exclusively and uniformly by all physicians, a physician is acting ethically and in accordance with the law if he uses one of these approved methods, even if it later turns out to be the wrong one.
Thus, in controversial areas, the burden really is on the patient to decide whether to accept the physician’s diagnosis and proposed treatment plan, or to seek another. This is why patients’ rights exist and are strongly protected by law. So if you are getting diagnoses like “there is nothing wrong,” or “it’s all in your head” and proposed treatment plans like “try ignoring it and seeing if it goes away,” you have no obligation to accept these. If you want another diagnosis or treatment plan, you have to find another physician who follows different methods of diagnosis and treatment for this kind of condition.
Excerpt from the Book: What mercury poisoning does to you
In an overall lifestyle sense, the fact that symptoms come and go leads to the victim having periods of weeks to years of being highly functional and productive, interspersed with periods of being nonproductive and having a hard time getting anything done. Life seems to progress in fits and starts. Great progress is made on projects which later get shelved for long periods. As the disease continues, the productive periods become shorter, fewer, and farther between.
There are emotional changes in mercury poisoning. Depression slowly sets in. Victims feel fatigued and listless. They lack motivation – even for crucial tasks. They lose interest in their surroundings and in their own life. They do not enjoy life, or experience happiness or joy. They experience constant fear e. g. of losing their job. They may be very tense. They feel hopeless. They have a sense of impending doom. Every small problem is discouraging. Minor difficulties seem overwhelming and insurmountable.
The altered emotional state of a mercury intoxicated person leads to impaired interpersonal relationships. They become increasingly irritable and sensitive, reacting strongly to relatively innocent remarks. They may not be able to take orders, instructions, or suggestions without losing their temper. They resent criticism and may interpret innocent remarks critically. They may have an exaggerated response to stimulation and become fearful or anxious and nervous. They may project their fears and anxieties onto others, making inappropriate criticisms or attacks. They become shy and avoid dealing with strangers. While timid, they may unexpectedly lose self control with strangers. They may wish to visit with friends and family extensively, often wishing to engage in long, repetitive conversations, then withdraw for prolonged periods of time. They withdraw more and more from social contacts.
Intelligence gradually deteriorates. Previously bright persons become dull and slow in thinking. They suffer from a progressive decline specifically affecting short term memory as well as the faculties for logical reasoning. Thus their ability to do things like balance the checkbook, do math, or play chess suffers. They lose the ability to concentrate. Memory problems may be more from distractability and inability to concentrate and pay enough attention to get things INTO their memory than an actual failure to remember things (thus they may complain of memory problems but do well on memory tests). They cease being motivated towards their work or other tasks. Thoughts become heavy, repetitive and pedantic. Creative thinking becomes progressively more difficult, eventually becoming impossible. They become unable to select the right words to convey their meaning, and make stylistic and grammatical errors. Their ability to express themselves declines progressively.
There is a distinctive cognitive symptom of being unable to think clearly without great effort. The best description for people who have not experienced it is of a hangover without pain. People who have experienced it will recognize the term “brain fog” as entirely descriptive.
As the victim’s level of intoxication waxes and wanes they go through periods of life when they do or do not dream. Dreaming may be in black and white.
Early physical symptoms include dizziness, tinnitus (ringing in the ears), insomnia, daytime drowsiness, loss of appetite, a tendency towards diarrhea – often alternating with constipation, cold hands and feet, a tendency towards sweating (some people have the opposite symptom and do not sweat at all), flushing or reddening of the skin – particularly on the face and neck. Some people blush frequently, but others do not blush at all. Asthma is a symptom of chronic mercury poisoning. Digestive disturbances are also common.
The skin becomes dry, athlete’s foot and toenail fungus progress, and the insides of the ankles, particularly behind the ankle bone and a bit above it become dry, itchy, flaky and peel. This often becomes painful and annoying enough to keep the victim up at night. Even after fungus and yeast infection has been eliminated hyperkeratosis, often with papular erythema and itching are common.
The hair becomes thinner, dryer, duller, less strongly colored, slower growing, and more brittle.
The biological clock is disturbed. Waking up late and staying up late is more common than being an “early bird.” Try as they might, the mercury poisoned person simply cannot control their circadian rhythm.
Victims may become photophobic and find bright light uncomfortable and unpleasant. There may be visual disturbances, including alterations in color perception leading to reduced sensitivity to the color red, or color blindness. The ability to focus on distant objects may be sporadically impaired. Peripheral vision may be reduced in the most severe cases.
The hands and feet often become distinctly cold. This can occur suddenly and is most distinctive when combined with sweating. Later in more severe poisoning they may also tingle or lose feeling.
The effects of mercury on the mouth are receding, sometimes spongy gums that bleed easily and teeth that are ‘loose’ in their sockets and can be wiggled very slightly. It also causes excessive salivation and unusually bad breath.
Mercury interferes with the sense of smell which becomes less acute, and later with hearing, in which perception of sounds does not diminish as notably as the patient’s ability to understand and interpret them – e. g. to understand speech directed at them even though they hear it clearly.
Victims often experience discomfort that feels like a “tight band around their head.” They may also experience sharp points of discomfort in their ear canals at bedtime.
Mercury also interferes with the body’s ability to regulate temperature. Victims may alternate between being hot and cold when the temperature isn’t changing, or have to wear more clothes than other people, or have more difficulty than other people in staying comfortable while the temperature changes. Temperature disregulation also leads to ‘night sweats.’
Excerpt from the book: Overview of treatment
Amalgam illness is analogous to a war. Your enemy, mercury, captured a beachhead in your teeth and fortified it with amalgam. Then it launched an attack. House to house. Organ to organ. Cell to cell. Slowly capturing your body. You win the war with a surgical strike. Dental surgery. Drill out those fillings. Removing your amalgam declares an armistice. Fighting stops, but the mercury atoms are still dug in wherever they reached. Chelation sends clean up squads off to round up the enemy and escort them out. Meanwhile the surviving cells in your body get to work and to repair the war damage. Supplementation is like disaster relief – it makes the process go a lot faster.
There are two goals to treatment. First, get rid of the mercury. Second, control symptoms so you can be comfortable and productive during the prolonged period when mercury is removed and healing takes place. In order to control your symptoms it is necessary to identify the metabolic defects mercury is causing for you.
In your ongoing battle to control symptoms while the mercury comes out and your body repairs all the damage, you need to take a straightforward, common sense approach.
Know yourself. If you react to everything, go slow, start with small doses of things, be patient. Don’t be any more aggressive than your body and your psyche can tolerate.
Start with the problems that are causing other problems.
If your digestion is not working, get your guts fixed up since this will take a load off your liver and let you get helpful supplements and medicines into you.
Make sure your hormones are working right. Treat your body, not numbers on a lab report.
Solve the other troublesome problems, and find solutions that work for you.
It is very common for mercury poisoned people to have been treated for depression, and for most MD’s to diagnose them as “just depressed.” While depression is often present it is not the cause of the problem. It should be treated to reduce suffering. The underlying problems causing it must be identified and treated too – just treating depression is like continuing to give painkillers day after day for a broken arm instead of setting it and putting it in a cast.
Excerpt from the Book: What to expect – prognosis
Both you and your doctor need to know how long it takes before you get well, and what do you expect along the way.
Using a proper protocol, e. g. DMSA every 3-4 hours on alternate weeks: 2-6 months to feel better. Then DMSA + LA every 3-4 hours 3 or 4 days every week or two to clear the brain and internal organs, 2-6 months to feel better. Continue supplements and diet control with continuing DMSA + LA chelation while healing takes place, another 4-30 months to good physical and mental health. Total time: 1 to 4 years if you stick with the program.
The big determiner of how long it takes is the DMSA+LA phase. That depends on how seriously poisoned you got.
You feel depressed, tired, icky. You are moderately poisoned. 6-11 months of DMSA+LA treatment will be required. You will FEEL cured immediately if you take the right supplements and medicines, but you have to chelate to get rid of the mercury.
You are starting to get stuff like chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, environmental sensitivities, severe allergies or asthma, emotional disturbances. 14-25 months of DMSA-LA will be required. You will feel MUCH better with the proper supplements and medicines and be able to get on with life pretty quickly.
You have multiple chemical sensitivities, chronic fatigue syndrome, serious emotional disturbances. You really are not able to participate in life. You are very seriously poisoned. You will need 20-36 months of DMSA+LA to get well. You will need proper supplements and medications to be at all functional and will need to pay careful attention to continuing them and adjusting them for 2-3 years until you are detoxed enough that your health isn’t coming out of a pill bottle.
If you continue to chelate with DMSA+LA for 6 months to a year after you are sure you are well you will remove more mercury from your brain and greatly reduce the chances of future problems, neurological disease, or premature aging.
If you follow a standard “alternative medicine” or “witch doctor” protocol, e. g. DMSA every other day or DMPS injections monthly: you will get worse for 6 months to one year, then slowly get better for another several years – but behavioral and coordination problems are exacerbated by this therapy and emotional symptoms are not alleviated. There is also a substantial risk of psychiatric illness. Total time: a year of misery, 5 years to feel better, but you never will be completely well.
If you drill out your fillings then do nothing: about the same thing will happen as with the “witch doctor” protocol, but without the side effects, expense, or risk of insanity.