Every day, we are exposed to pollutants, chemicals and toxins that are absorbed into our skin, digestive system and lungs. As toxins accumulate, your body becomes more stressed and impaired, lessening your body’s natural ability to fight disease. But something can be done to go back to joyful living!
Heavy metals such as mercury, lead, nickel or cadmium can be partly responsible for a wide variety of illnesses. Such as migraines, joint pain or a weak immune system. The removal of these dangerous toxins is often the first step in a basic therapy to return to health.
Unstoppable technological advances have contaminated our environment with a whole array of heavy metals and other poisons. The air that we breathe, the water we drink, the soil and microorganisms – all are usually burdened with metals and other poisons to some degree or other. And by way of the crops and animals that we eat, so are we human beings.
A great deal of the heavy metals we absorb come right from our environment. For example from exhaust fumes or amalgam fillings.
Depending on the degree to which we absorb them into our organism, these substances can make us seriously ill. So why and how do they harm us, and how can we get rid of them and get back to health? Environmental poisons have shown to contribute to conditions such as heart disease, joint pain, gout, cancer, dementia and infertility. Of course, heavy metals are not responsible for all illnesses. You need to consider nutritional deficiencies, emotional burdens, social hardship and other factors as playing a possible role.
Still, the impact of metals poisoning deserves special attention, because its potential damage is widely underestimated. That is, on the one hand the true extent to which our environment is burdened with these poisons is not clear and on the other we are increasingly exposed. We know from testing of drill cores in Greenland ice that the heavy metals burden on the environment, specifically also with lead, has increased exponentially since the 1950s. This is an ongoing development and relates to numerous elements whose damaging effects are further intensified in each other’s presence.
Unfortunately, medicine pays little attention to this information –with respect to diagnosis as well as therapies.
Many additives in industrially manufactured food contain heavy metals, such as aluminum for example
How does heavy metals poisoning affect the body?
People often wonder how to visualize the poisonous effects of a heavy metal in our body. The mechanisms of the damage have actually been researched quite well. When these poisons are absorbed via our intestinal mucosa, or through the lungs and partly even the skin, the metals enter the blood stream and then end up in the organs. Once there, they can damage the protective function of our cellular walls, penetrate them, and interfere with the millions of ongoing cellular processes.
The reason they are capable of doing so, is that their molecular structures actually resemble vital substances. For example, lead, nickel and mercury, to name just a few, can totally imitate such essential minerals to the human body as magnesium, calcium or zinc, and drive them out bit by bit. Moreover, the potentially poisonous heavy metals act like aggressive free radicals and damage the cell nuclei along with the genetic information contained therein. But also the mitochondria, our intracellular “energy power houses”.
From Cell Ageing to Immune Deficiency – the Multifaceted Effects
What are the Consequences?
Of course, the loss of energy will initially impact vital cell functions. But all in all, it also will speed up cell ageing, and death. In addition, it decreases the renewal of body tissue which is essential, irrespective of whether it’s in the muscles, the liver, kidneys, digestive tract or in the brain. Consequently, our muscle power is weakened, for example the heart’s. The kidneys and liver get damaged or at least afffected, and these organs will likely be even less able to detoxify the body than before – so it’s a vicious cycle!
Chronic infections and delicate disturbances of the immune system can develop. On the one hand, a weakening, and on the other often an overreaction, that is, all kinds of allergies.
And finally, the brain’s functions slow down too. Memory, concentration and creativity, the ability to learn, but also to simply enjoy life is hindered. These are all symptoms we see with dementias too.
New scientific findings show that heavy metals play a role in the development of dementia
The old Romans poisoned themselves by sweetening their wine with lead acetate. This seemed to be a clever idea, because they would have needed disproportionately more of the expensive honey, which would have been just as suitable for the purpose.
But this seemingly ingenious idea lead to sickness, lingering illness and death in many cases back then. Although the toxicity of lead was well-understood at the time, its toxic compounds were not.
The toxic metals burdening us today world-wide, according to information presented by the U.S. Environmental Office and the Agency for Toxic Substances, are first and foremost the metalloid Arsenic which is the most damaging substance, but it is quickly followed by the heavy metals lead and mercury, furthermore by cadmium, nickel, chromium, copper, palladium and silver.
Today’s ocean fish is loaded with mercury.
Toxic substances can easily get into the body. In our daily living, we come into contact with heavy metals all the time. For example, many additives are used in making processed foods, such as E141 with copper, E171 with Titanium Dioxide etc. Aluminum is present in at least five such E numbers. When you eat fish, then you are very likely to ingest methyl mercury, but often arsenic and/or cadmium as well. The latter is even fortified because of the chemical fertilizers in the food chain.
Liquid manure which is seemingly natural contains heavy metals too, and they are deposited on the fields and meadows. And don’t forget the amalgam fillings which contain mercury, copper and tin. Apart from the numerous metals used in prosthetics.
Although liquid manure is a natural fertilizer, it contributes to heavy metals staying in the feed / food cycle.
Complaints that can hint to Toxicity
We see in clinic how very specific illnesses such as high blood pressure, migraines and impaired vision etc. can result. But this is not to be understood mechanically. That is, you can’t say that a specific amount of mercury causes high blood pressure or a certain amount of lead leads to arteriosclerosis. The potential relationships are much more complicated. The complaints stemming from heavy metals depend on many different factors: from genetic inheritance just as much as from the general living conditions. But mostly on how much and which metals and other toxic substances interact in the specific case.
Help yourself – easily
The garlic-lemon clean-up 
Organic Ingredients:
- 5 lemons
- 30 cloves of garlic
Wash the lemons well and cut them up, rind on, together with the garlic. Heat everything up in 1 litre of water until it starts seething. Do not bring to the boil, so as not to destroy valuable vitamins! Cool the brew, strain it and fill in a glass bottle. Keep in the fridge.
Dosage:
Take one shot glass daily – either in the morning on an empty stomach or on an empty stomach before a main meal.
Detoxifying with the Stinging nettle
The stinging nettle is one of the most important and most effective detoxification plants. It cleans the blood, kidneys and lymphatic vessels and increases the body’s own immune response. In addition, it is good-tasting (I think!). If you have good tolerance to the stinging nettle, make and sip an infusion of 2 tsp. of stinging nettle with 250 ml of boiling water several times daily.
Stinging Nettle has been used in folk medicine since time immemorial for Detoxification purposes
To make a stinging nettle vinegar, which is just as effective for detoxification:
- Grind 50 g of dried stinging nettle
- Mix with 500 ml of naturally cloudy apple cider vinegar and transfer to a large screw top jar
- Store the mixture for 10 days at room temperature
- Pan the glass daily in order to mix the solids anew
Dosage:
Mix 1 tsp of the vinegar with a warm glass of water and drink prior to the main meals.
Signs of possible heavy metals toxicity
You need to always consider a person’s previous medical history and their individual burden. Signs can be dental materials that have been used, eating habits and lifestyle, and well as work place conditions. Often symptoms such as weakness of memory and concentration, declining general productivity, chronic pain, allergies and recurring infections are signs of heavy metals toxicity. But also high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, depression, autoimmune diseases and cancer and many other illnesses can be caused or intensified by chronic heavy metals burden.
Detoxifying with Dandelions
Considered by many as just an annoying weed in the garden, dandelion actually has a variety of medicinal properties and is used as an herbal remedy in Europe, North America and China, to treat infections, bile and liver problems. It is also a powerful diuretic which, unlike pharmaceutical diuretics, does not drain the body of potassium because it is also rich in potassium. Dandelions also contain vitamin A, calcium, and iron.
Dandelions are completely edible, but avoid eating those that have been sprayed with pesticides!
Adding dandelion to your diet
1. Add fresh dandelion leaves to your salads
2. Make fresh or dried dandelion roots or leaves into an herbal tea. The roots have anti-rheumatic properties.
Dandelion Herbal Tea Recipe
4 cups pure water
6 tablespoons dried dandelion root (1 year old minimum)
6 tablespoons dried dandelion leaf (double amount if fresh)
Dandelion Root Tincture
Add 2 to 3 teaspoons of root into 1 cup of water, bring to a boil, simmer for 10 to 15 minutes.
Drink 3-5 ml 3 times per day.
When it comes to heavy metals toxicity, it is generally due to multiple metals affecting us all at once. A burden from just one single heavy metal is rather unlikely. Moreover, studies point to the conclusion that toxicity of an element increases in the presence of another. Mercury’s toxicity, for example, increases many times over when lead or cadmium is also present.
We are therefore often dealing with circumstances where the metals, even though their individual quantities lie within the official safety limits, can cause considerable damage when they appear together. This is often not recognized by the authorities determining those safety limits. Furthermore, the maxim permissible amounts are generally based on the healthy and not on people who are already weakened by illness. But they are the ones who are particularly susceptible to the poisonous effects of the respective toxins.
A special Note on Aluminum
Aluminum is not a nutrient – it’s a known toxin, and it’s everywhere! It’s in the foil that wraps our food and lines our juice drinks. It’s in our baked goods by way of baking powder, salt, self-rising flour, anti-caking agents and baking pans. And it’s added to our drinking water to improve clarity. It’s in our tea and coffee, cocoa and malt drinks, and just about every processed food. It is in buffered aspirins, antacids and vaccines. And it’s in most sunscreens, deodorants (including “natural crystal sticks”), and cosmetics.
When the amount of aluminum we eat, breathe, or absorb exceeds our body’s ability to excrete it, the metal deposits in our tissues. Aluminum researcher Professor Chris Exley of the UK calls it the “silent visitor” because it creeps into the body and beds down in our bones and brain.
In a far-reaching study published in January (1995), William Forbes, a University of Waterloo gerontologist, demonstrated an apparent connection between mental impairment and aluminium in about 100 Ontario communities. In each community, researchers determined the amount of aluminium in the water supply and tested the mental state of people starting at the age of 45 and continuing over a period of 35 years. They concluded, said Forbes, that the risk of impaired mental functions was “almost 10 times higher in areas where the aluminium levels in drinking water were high.”
According to Health Canada’s 2003 Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality, a health-based guideline for aluminum in drinking water has not been established. However, water treatment plants using aluminum-based coagulants should optimize their operations to reduce residual aluminum levels in treated water to the lowest extent possible as a precautionary measure, while not compromising the effectiveness of disinfection processes or interfering with the removal of disinfection by-product precursors.
The Fluoride connection
Most municipal water systems add aluminum sulfate to their water as part of the treatment and clarifying process. But many also add fluoride in hopes of preventing tooth decay in children.
Studies of laboratory animals found that such a combination of fluoride and aluminum led to degeneration of the brain and kidneys, along with increased levels of aluminum in the brain. In one study, 80 % of animals that drank water with low levels of aluminum and fluoride died; others showed premature aging. Researchers theorize that fluoride makes it easier for aluminum to pass into the brain and create dementia-like degenerative changes.
In Canada, about 30 different municipalities have voted to ban fluoride in recent years, including Calgary (2011), Waterloo (2010) and Windsor (2013).
What to do?
We can’t eliminate aluminum exposure in our lives, but we can reduce it by removing as many sources as possible. And we should especially avoid storing or cooking acidic foods (citrus, tomatoes, sauerkraut) in aluminum foil, pans or packaging.
According to Dr. Mercola, MD, certain supplements can also help to remove aluminum from our systems, including silica-rich water (e.g. Fiji water), melatonin, curcumin, and anything that increases glutathione (e.g. raw fruits and vegetables, MSM, Epson salt baths, exercise).
Elimination of poisons from the body
Generally, the body discharges substances it recognizes as poisons, albeit very slowly. This also varies from metal to metal and from person to person. But even then, if say, no new toxins were taken in from now on, it would take many years on average.
A detoxification method tried and tested in folk medicine is oil pulling. You take just short of a tbsp. of sunflower oil and squish it around in your mouth. Then spit out the resulting liquid. I’ve used this method with coconut oil and that works well too!
For example, for aluminum, the half-life period in the brain is estimated at around seven years, for lead in the bones even 30. This means that after this respectively long period we are rid of only half of the metal in question! This leaves the remaining metals enough time to cause a number of complaints resp. symptoms which unfortunately do not disappear on their own.
Treating Aluminum Toxicity with homeopathic Alumina
Dr. Margery Blackie (1898 – 1981), who served as homeopathic physician to Queen Elizabeth II, said that while she did not think that everybody is sensitive to aluminum, she was sure that there were a proportion of people who were. She noted that when the Royal Navy banned aluminum cookware for a time, gastric and duodenal ulcers declined by 50 %. This according to “Classical Homeopathy” by Dr. Margery Blackie, Beaconsfield Publishers 1986).
Dr. Blackie also offered examples of her own patients who seemed especially sensitive to aluminum and whose health improved when they eliminated it from their diet and / or were treated with homeopathically prepared aluminum (Alumina). They all tended to have pale skin with a peculiar greyish tint “as if the white of an egg had dried on the face”, she noted.
One very thin, lined, drawn man in his 70s with inoperable carcinoma of the gallbladder “complained of constant abdominal pain and a gripping sensation when he tried to eat, as if food stuck somewhere”. Dr. Blackie suspected aluminum poisoning and asked him to stop using aluminum cookware and utensils. After two weeks, he was somewhat improved, which told her she might be on the right track, so she then gave him a dose of Alumina. Within two months, he had gained 7 pounds and was eating fairly well again with minimal discomfort; he went on to live another 12 years. “He has always stuck in my mind as the colour of aluminum and one of the true cases of aluminum poisoning”, she said.
Aluminum sensitivity tends to run in families, said Dr. Blackie, and she related the case of a 33-year-old man and his 7-year-old son who both complained of painful indigestion while eating, with difficult, constricted swallowing as if there were an obstruction; they also had obstinate constipation, often with no desire for a bowel movement. In addition, the boy ate “all kinds of funny things”, like charcoal and cinders, and his stomach ache was much worse if he ate potatoes. As these all sounded like aluminum symptoms, she convinced them to eliminate aluminum cookware, and within a few months their symptoms were largely gone with the wife/mother of the family reporting: “My family’s health is entirely different. It’s so much better, I can’t believe it”.
Dr. Donald Foubister (1902 – 1988), a colleague of Dr. Blackie’s at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, also warned about the perils of aluminum exposure for sensitive people. In his “Therapeutic Hints for Students of Homeopathy” he wrote: “When repertorizing any chronic case careful note should be made of Alumina symptoms. Alumina is rarely the constitutional remedy, but if there are some characteristic symptoms present or, in the case of a patient suffering from any allergic condition, including eczema and migraine, or from any disease of the digestive tract, it is advisable for the patient to avoid eating food prepared in aluminum cooking utensils, or drinks from water heated in an aluminum kettle. …’Tinfoil’ used for cooking also contains aluminum, and electric radiators with an aluminum reflector may cause symptoms in sensitive patients.
… It has been suggested that it is impossible to avoid aluminum today.
That is so, but the majority of sensitive patients are better off when they avoid it as much as possible and take a dose of Alumina when symptoms arrive.
A prescription of the constitutional remedy followed by Alumina given ten to fourteen days later works very well.
How detoxification works
I support a number of drainage methods, whether it’s homeopathic remedies, specific herbal teas or methods proven in folk medicine such as oil pulling.
As well, ion foot detoxification is an effective system for safe and easy complete body detoxification. You place your feet in a footbath and through the process of osmosis, neutralized toxins are pulled from the body through the 2,000 sweat glands of the feet, and deposited into the water. It takes just 30 minutes. Don’t forget to replace vital minerals and trace elements to avoid any undesired reactions after the detox.
The ion foot bath: A powerful way to detox in minutes!
I would be happy to discuss your individual detox requirements in a consultation at the clinic. Please call (519) 603-0505 to book your appointment today.
In health,
Irene Schwens, DHMHS, C. Tran.
Owner / Homeopath
K-W HOMEOPATHIC MEDICINE
……………………….………ANDWELLNESS CLINIC
“The physician’s highest and only calling
is to make the sick healthy, to cure, as it is called”
— Dr. Samuel Hahnemann, §1, Organon of the Medical Art —
