There are four ways of testing for mercury toxicity: challenge tests like DMPS or DMSA; and tests using hair, urine or blood. Dr Christopher Shade’s experiences with mercury detoxification led him to find that the best is a combination of testing hair, blood and urine. He goes into this in the above video.
The problem with challenge tests like the DMPS is that they use chemicals that can be toxic to the liver, so a careful check has to be kept on that during the process. The challenge tests also need our kidneys to be healthy; since one of the symptoms of mercury toxicity can be kidney damage, we clearly have a problem here when we use the DMPS challenge to determine toxicity levels and to cure the problem.
Pumping the body full of chemical chelaters that pull out mercury and dump it into the blood stream, to be processed by the liver and flooded out through the urine is fine if the person is not too sick. If the kidneys are not up to snuff, they become a closed door, so the mercury now circulates through the body, landing in different places than before and making the person much sicker. Also the DMPS challenge will show them as not particularly toxic, because not much mercury got out! People who have pokey kidneys flush the mercury out nicely, apparently seeming far more toxic, but are, in fact, easy to detoxify.
The three more natural ways of determining mercury toxicity show different things: blood contains both dental mercury and fish mercury, but the fish mercury tends to hide the dental, so the blood needs separating out to find the true levels and type of toxicity.
Hair shows fish mercury.
Urine shows dental mercury, and, when compared to the blood levels, shows how well the kidneys are doing at getting rid of the stuff.
And so Dr Shade’s company, Quicksilver scientific, runs all three tests to determine what the problem really is, and what detoxification organ/s need help.
Incidentally, the final part of the video is all about how to get tested by Quicksilver, and applies more to the US than the UK. Unfortunately, I can imagine various reactions of a British GP if we ask NHS to pay for the American company Quicksilver to help sort us out – none positive. More information can be found on the company’s website is http://www.quicksilverscientific.com/.
Next blog will cover the all important question of whether we can detoxify mercury safely whilst we still have amalgam fillings in our mouth.