Metal Tox

People are becoming increasingly aware of the problem with mercury toxicity. It would be a mistake however, to think that metal poisoning is unique to mercury. All metals are toxic and our bodies require special transport and handling mechanisms to keep them from harming us. This applies just as much to essential minerals, like iron, zinc and chromium, as it does to non-essential metals and metalloids, like cadmium, lead and arsenic.

Metals can directly and indirectly damage DNA, leading to an increased risk of Cancer (genotoxicity). There are also possible non-genotoxic pathways, due to irritation or immuno-toxicity caused by the presence of toxic metals. A number of metals are known to be carcinogenic. These include arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, nickel, and all their associated compounds, as well as hexavalent chromium (Remember the movie “Erin Brockovich”?).

The usual target for toxic metals is the lung, though arsenic has a unique association with skin Cancers that has been recognized for many years.

Metal implants in the body (i.e. in bone pinning or plates) may be associated with adjacent Cancers caused by irritation of the tissues. The late Patrick Stortebecker at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm pointed out the frequency with which Cancer of the jaw was found in association with metal amalgam fillings. This is disturbing news, since this particular kind of “prosthetic” tends to be very long term and very common indeed.

The presence of toxic metals in our systems is highly significant, for they are capable of causing serious health problems by interfering with normal biological functioning. Although they can be found in high concentrations in the body, a number of these heavy metals (aluminum, beryllium, cadmium,lead and mercury) have no known biological function. Others (arsenic, copper, iron and nickel) are thought to be essential at low concentrations, but are toxic at high levels.

We also face the usually-ignored problem of potentiation, which means two relatively small doses of two different substances may have a dramatically enhanced effect when present together. For instance, it is not widely known that the presence of lead (which is everywhere) makes mercury 100 times more toxic.

Metal-metal interactions may be critical in the formation of degeneration. Animal studies show that calcium enhances lead toxicity in rats and cadmium increases the likelihood of cadmium induced prostatic Cancer. Given these insights, the complacency of traditional dentists over the cocktail of metalloids they put in our mouths as “amalgam” is little short of scientific folly. In the US they call them silver fillings, in an effort to imply purity and divert from the fact they are an amalgam of several different metals, of which silver is only a small proportion of the whole.

MTL-Tox was specifically designed to assist in the removal of metal toxicity and provide the resonances to allow for healing and repair of biological function.