Hacking the Heavy Metal Detox Process – For Advanced Users Only!

Disclaimer: The Anti-Lyme Journal is an informational publication written by Bryan Rosner. Bryan Rosner is not a doctor, and he has no formal medical licenses or qualifications. Instead, he is a layperson who reports on his own personal experiences and research. Therefore, please view these articles as informational only. These articles are not intended to be used or applied as medical advice or as instructions. Any and all ideas and concepts discussed in these articles should be independently verified with a licensed doctor. There may be errors, mistakes, or lack of wisdom/knowledge/accuracy in these articles. The information contained herein hasn’t been reviewed by any medical authority or by the FDA. Mercury and heavy metal detox protocols are ESPECIALLY hazardous.

Background on Mercury & Lyme Disease: Lyme and mercury are buddies. When you have Lyme, you often also have mercury and a number of other heavy metal toxins. There’s no good consensus on “which came first, the chicken or the egg.” Perhaps Lyme weakens the organs and allows heavy metals to stick around and not be detoxed properly? Perhaps heavy metal toxicity opens the door to immune vulnerability which allows Lyme to take hold? Before moving on, I want to say this: if you are new to the idea of heavy metal toxicity with Lyme disease, this is a very important topic. Don’t delay in becoming educated TODAY. Here are some initial, basic resources for you to consider, and then I’ll move on to today’s topic which is a bit more advanced.

Beginner Resources:

• Intro to Lyme disease & Mercury – This is a free excerpt from one of my books. It explains some background on the topic of why Lyme & mercury are partners, and what to do about it. A must read.
• Amalgam Illness: Diagnosis & Treatment – I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Of all the books in my library, it has more highlighting, dog-eared pages, and underlining than any other book I own. This is THE book on mercury poisoning – whether you have this condition from Lyme or any other problem. This book literally changed my life, and saved my life at a very dark time circa 2003 when I was very sick. I strongly suggest that ALL Lyme sufferers read it.

OK, now that we’ve covered some intro materials, I’ll move on to a more advanced topic for today.

Advanced Mercury Strategies – not for Beginners!

Mercury detox is DANGEROUS. Do not engage in mercury toxicity treatment without the care of a physician! You can make yourself PERMANENTLY worse.

It took me years of on-and-off mercury chelation rounds (see this book for more on what a “round” is) to get all the mercury out of my system. Well, I won’t say “all,” because we are constantly exposed to small mercury amounts in our environment, and our bodies always have some on board, so we can’t get it all out. But it took me years to get most of it out.

What I noticed, though, after so many rounds of chelation, was that I would often still react to mercury treatments and chelators. So apparently it wasn’t all out – as we just discussed. But the question at this juncture became, now what? Should I keep doing more, endless, long, full-dose mercury chelation rounds to try to get it all out? Or should I ignore it? Or should I do something else?

Here’s my conclusion to this question – the question that anyone who has removed most of their mercury might be asking.

So, I believe, when you are at this stage in the process, where we’ll estimate that around 95-97% of mercury has been removed, something else begins to happen. You are no longer trying to use full doses of chelator to get out big amounts of mercury. What you face now, instead, is that the remaining infections in your body, whether big or small, will work extra hard and go out of their way to utilize the small amounts of remaining heavy metals to their advantage. What does this look like? Studies have proven that biofilms use heavy metals in their matrices, so that’s one way Lyme & co-infections can use heavy metals – to make biofilms. We also know that these heavy metals can weaken the immune system, so that’s another way infections can use them to their advantage.

So what I discovered at this juncture was that I didn’t need full-dose chelation anymore – in fact, full dose chelation seemed very undesirable – it came with side effects of the chelators themselves, and it also came with un-needed and un-wanted mini-mercury stir-ups, as the last few percent of mercury bounced around my body without a meaningfully large sum of mercury being excreted.

So instead of regular chelation, I experimented with using much smaller doses of chelators, and even miniscule doses of “forbidden” chelators which are not part of an appropriate chelation campaign due to their redistribution issues (see cited resources for beginners above). What I found was that, as I used tiny doses of all different kinds of chelators, the new benefit here wasn’t removing big amounts of heavy metals, but instead, directly penetrating and disrupting biofilm activities of the small remaining infections in my body. In other words, the goal had shifted from removing big chunks of metals to simply disrupting the heavy metals in biofilms.

Now, this may seem obvious to you – duh – just take heavy metal chelators to disrupt biofilms. And this is in fact what many Lyme practitioners advocate. Fine, I’m on board. Just be careful to use safer methods if you are very metal toxic – safer methods as described in the aforementioned book.

For example, many Lyme practitioners recommend subsbances like zeolite and EDTA. These, I’ve found, can be helpful in TINY doses and ONLY AFTER the majority of heavy metals have been detoxed. If you use these too early in the process, they can cause damage, redistribution, and worsening. See the distinction? I found there to be a very pronounced strategy change that occurred after most of the mercury was removed.

So, for beginners, I only recommend using the methods of Andy Cutler, in the aforementioned book. But for more advanced people who’ve done that for a long time, I found things such as zeolite, EDTA, and chlorella (all “forbidden” and dangerous to very toxic people) to be helpful in very small doses to disrupt bacterial pockets, safe havens, biofilm colonies, and protected infective niches in the body. The new goal becomes to use micro-amounts of these treatments not to detox body tissues, but to just hit the tiny niches of bacteria and take away the metals they need to sustain themselves.

When I was in my final phases of recovery, I found this new strategy to be super helpful and maybe even mandatory in my own healing as I seemed to “hit a wall” where all Lyme treatments would stop working, but taking micro-doses of things that chelated metals, seemed to pack a punch and weaken the organisms.

So, there you have it. An “Advanced” strategy for using mercury detox supplements. This is the “normal” strategy for most Lyme doctors, but I think it shouldn’t be a normal strategy: for someone really toxic with metals, this strategy could make them much, much worse; instead, I recommend the “beginner’s” strategy as laid out in the book mentioned above.

DISCLAIMER: Mercury detoxification is VERY VERY DANGEROUS. Absolutely DO NOT attempt this without the help of a doctor. Do NOT jump head first into a detox program… start very slow and carefully, and only after reading the book I mentioned above. Please remember: I’m not a doctor. This information is based on my informal, layperson experiences and research only. DO NOT interpret this blog post as medical advice; instead, it is simply an informational post with stuff I’ve learned as an informal, non-professional researcher.  Some people may get PERMANENTLY WORSE from improper mercury chelation.