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A Poisoned Doctor: My Own Brain Failure

As you know from Part I, I learned about the importance of toxins and detoxification the hard way... in my own life... as a patient.

I had a fascination and love for China and the Orient, which probably started because of our regular Sunday dinner trips to Chinese restaurants during my childhood. Little did I know going to China would damage my brain and derail my life.

At Cornell, I majored in Asian Studies and studied Mandarin Chinese. I then went on a three-month sojourn through the remotest areas of China in 1984, after my first year of medical school, with the woman who would become my wife.

I loved the culture, the people, and the way food is treated as medicine. In China, people “eat” their medicine. The words for “take your medicine” are “
chi yao
,” which means eat your medicine. Food and healing are intimately connected. In China, food is pharmacology.

I returned to China ten years later to live and work in Beijing and develop a medical center. In one decade the landscape had changed from a city of 10 million people wearing Mao suits and riding bicycles to a frenzied, money-chasing city filled with Audi limos, cell phones, high heels, and business suits.

But the homes of the 10 million were still heated by raw coal, sending a dark cloud over the city on the brightest winter days. People walked the streets with surgical masks to filter out the black air. At the time, I was unaware that coal burning is the most significant source of mercury emissions. I breathed that air every day.

At the time I knew nothing of mercury, nor had I heard about genetic polymorphisms. But it turns out that I am missing a key gene necessary for the detoxification of mercury and many other twenty-first-century poisons, the GSTM1 gene.

About half our population is missing this gene. It turns out that it is the sick half!

Shortly after I returned home to the beautiful Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts, I became ill with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).

How could this happen? Why was I sick? Certainly the stress of sleepless nights working in the emergency room weren’t good for me and getting a severe intestinal infection from a lake in Maine didn’t help either, but suddenly I was sick.

After I spent a few years searching for the cause of my illness, a colleague mentioned that many people with CFS are toxic.

So I checked my hair for mercury. It was high. Perhaps growing up on daily tuna fish sandwiches, receiving multiple immunizations, using contact lens fluid with thimerosal, and my love of sushi all became too much to handle once I inhaled a toxic load of mercury from the cold, dark winter air in Beijing.

I took a urine test to see the total mercury load in my body. I used a chelating substance, which binds up metals in the body and carries them out in the urine and stool. “Normal” levels of mercury are less than 3 mcg/g of creatinine. My level was almost 200 mcg/g of creatinine. Anything over 50 mcg/g of creatinine is considered “poisoning.”

Through a long learning process, experimentation on myself, and conversations with dozens of experts, I was able to rid my body of mercury using a careful, deliberate detoxification process that included detoxifying foods, supplements, intravenous glutathione and vitamin C, metal chelators, and saunas.

I also worked on healing my gut by eliminating food allergens and using probiotics and enzymes, but it didn’t get completely better until I got the mercury out of my system.

The brain fog, depression, insomnia, severe memory deficits, and slowed thinking that are the symptoms of CFS lifted, and I got my brain and my health back.

Unfortunately, this is a story repeated over and over in our society. We live in a sea of toxins—6 million pounds of mercury emissions a year, and 2.5 billion pounds of 80,000 other toxic chemicals.

These industrial emissions threaten our health and the health of our planet. Global warming and chronic health problems are triggered by the same emissions. How can these known neurotoxins not affect our brains? How exactly do they harm our brains? What can we do to protect and detoxify ourselves?

These are questions that medicine must face and answer. Each person responds differently to toxins. Some are great detoxifiers; others, like me and those with autism, ADHD, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and depression, are often not.

Let’s look at what the research has to say about which toxins affect your health most dramatically. Remember, these are only examples. Every chemical currently in use that has not been tested for toxicity by public health agencies is a potential health threat. Keep in mind that only about 0.6 percent of all chemicals now in use have been tested.

As a doctor, one of the things that concerns me most is the impact these untested chemicals may have on our health as we age.

Mercury and Illness: Demented or Toxic?

Few topics are so politically and scientifically charged and have such enormous implications for our health and our economy that we avoid them as the impact of heavy metals (and mercury in particular) on our health.

But, like nutrition, poisoning with heavy metals such as mercury and other toxins and the importance of detoxification is not something we learn about in medical school.

So we have few tools to address this toxic exposure, which is contributing to many of the health epidemics we see in today’s world. Once we start looking a little deeper, the effects of toxins are not hard to document.

Thankfully, though, the human organism has an extraordinary capacity for resiliency, regeneration, recovery, and renewal. I have seen this over and over, not only in relation to my own mercury-toxic brain and its recovery, but also in the recovery of so many patients with depression, behavior problems, ADHD, autism, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease.

So, even if you haven’t been treated for toxins you have certainly been exposed to, there is still hope—even in extreme cases. We need to look under the “hood” and see what dirt and poisons we may find, then clean up the metabolic, immunological, and biochemical mess.

So how do toxins connect to dementia?

Dementia is a “brain disease” that may affect cognitive function, language, attention, memory, personality, and abstract reasoning. In severe forms people’s memories disappear, they forget their history, they stop talking, and their personality evaporates. A terrifying, progressive, irreversible process, dementia does not have a good medical treatment except for toxic medications with many side effects that, at best, may delay entry into a nursing home by a few months.

Dementia is a big problem and growing every day. Ten percent of sixty-five-year-olds, 25 percent of seventy-five-year-olds, and 50 percent of eighty-five-year-olds will get Alzheimer’s (which is a form of dementia) at a cost of $60 billion a year to society. Scientists predict that the number of people with Alzheimer’s will triple in the next few decades. It is now the seventh leading cause of death.
¹

And basically the medical community has no solution for it.

I was recently speaking on a panel for PBS-TV at the American Association of Retired Persons convention in Boston. The topic was dementia. A woman with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) was on the panel—MCI is sort of like pre-Alzheimer’s or predementia—and everyone on the panel (including the Harvard neurologist) agreed that memory loss is
not
a normal part of aging. But now 22 percent, or 5.4 million people over seventy have “predementia.”
²

The sad part was that the doctors on the panel didn’t have much to offer in the way of prevention—just a very bad and pretty ineffective selection of drugs with many nasty side effects.

But there is a way to prevent, treat, and sometimes even reverse the memory loss in dementia. That is where my patient, George, comes in.

George had a diagnosis of dementia and came with his wife to see me. He could no longer manage his business affairs, had become increasingly unable to function at home, and had to withdraw from family and social relationships.

He was desperate as he felt himself slipping away.

As I said above, there is no effective known treatment for dementia. But we do know a lot about what affects brain function and brain aging: our nutrition, vitamin deficiencies, omega-3 fat deficiencies, inflammation from food, infections and the gut, environmental toxins, stress, exercise, hormonal imbalances, and trouble producing energy in our cells.