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ISBN: 0967616808

Description

Heavy Metal Bulletin, volume 5 number 3 August 1999
"Amalgam Illness, Diagnosis and Treatment" provides practical tools for use in trying to sort out a health problem. ... Himself and amalgam victim, Cutler describes the weird world of an amalgam patient in a very initiated way. Mercury and other heavy metals take up residence in the active site of liver enzymes where some essential substance is supposed to be sitting. The enzymes stop detoxifying pollutants and naturally occurring toxins and the victim becomes more sensitive to air quality, foods and chemicals. ... A chelating agent ... has two or more thiol groups in the same molecule which hold onto the mercury more tightly and is more likely to be able to move it out of the body safely. ... The objective of the suggested treatment is to minimize the redistribution of mercury, and to get it out of the system.


From the Publisher
This book presents a wealth of information on mercury poisoning such as you might have gotten from dental amalgam fillings, laboratory accidents, occupational exposure to mercury, exposure to mercury preservatives in health care products such as eye care products and contraceptives, etc. The book discusses how to tell if you have mercury poisoning, what to do about it, how to get help, and how to deal with physicians. Much of this information is covered several times at different levels so that you can find the amount of detail that best suits you. The book is straightforward and factual. The book is a tool for solving intractable health problems.

This book need not be read cover to cover or in any particular order. Figures and tables have been included to rapidly convey how the different symptoms are interrelated and how different medicines and nutritional supplements can be used.

This book is intentionally very broad. A large number of supplements and medicines are discussed. Thus there will be SOMETHING that each individual patient's metabolism tolerates, and SOMETHING that each physician is familiar and comfortable with.

This book gives you the options you need - you decide what to use.

This book discusses methods to diagnose and treat some of the physiological and metabolic dysfunctions which are a part of chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and environmental illness. Some of the information will be helpful even if mercury isn't the root of your problems.

The book is written as a straightforward reference book for you, not as super sophisticated research treatise for medical school professors. Everyday terms have been used when possible. Thus "low thyroid" instead of "hypothyroid," "poisoned" instead of "intoxicated," etc. Where medical words need to be used, they are explained.

Instead of a very long list of esoteric and obscure references, there is a short list of helpful and interesting books and papers that explains what they are so you can decide if they would help you. This book covers:

how to find and work with good doctors;

the effects of chronic mercury poisoning, and how mercury causes these effects;

how to diagnose chronic mercury poisoning;

how to treat chronic mercury poisoning;

scientific evidence that a lot of people are mercury poisoned.

This book is especially valuable because some physicians are not yet familiar with the diagnosis and treatment of chronic mercury poisoning. Their textbooks state that there is no suitable biological index for the amount of mercury in the target organ, the brain, but do not explain what tests to use in place of the old fashioned ones that miss 2 cases out of 3. Worse, the textbooks offer no guidance on how to cure chronic mercury poisoning or control symptoms during treatment. This book gives your physician the information they need to help you.

Since the medical textbooks aren't up to date on chronic mercury poisoning yet, the burden is on you, the patient, to decide whether to accept a physician's diagnosis and proposed treatment plan, or to seek another. If you are getting diagnoses like "there is nothing wrong," or "it's all in your head" and proposed treatment plans like "try ignoring it and seeing if it goes away," this is the right book for you. Don't suffer silently. Read Amalgam Illness: Diagnosis And Treatment and get well.


From the Author
I wrote this book because I became seriously ill while most doctors told me there was nothing wrong. After an "environmental medicine" doctor suggested I had amalgam illness I had to read lots of medical literature to figure out what was going on and what to do about it. I got better after having my fillings replaced and taking appropriate chelating agents. I also know a lot of other people to whom this happened.


I was very lucky when I got sick. Not lucky to get sick! That was a terrible experience! But I was lucky to have received exactly the right education before I needed it - close enough to medicine to be able to read physician's textbooks, but not close enough to share all the myths and be sure of the things "everyone knows." I was lucky to have had some business experience so I viewed physicians as professional service providers and knew how to get the services I needed from them. I had the right political experience to realize I could get lots of valuable information by just talking to enough people, but that certain things had to be learned by reading books.

I didn't only learn how to get better. I also learned how much people suffer from this terrible condition. I learned how poorly understood mercury poisoning is. I wrote this book so that other people don't have to do all their own detective work when they get sick. So that people could start with the best information I could find. So that future victims of mercury poisoning won't have to suffer unnecessarily because nobody really knows what to do. I wrote this book to help you get well.

Sometimes it takes the doctors a while to figure out what is causing a disease. Until recently it was believed that ulcers were entirely psychosomatic. Ulcer sufferers underwent prolonged treatment, were seldom cured, and often ended up under the surgeon's knife. It is now known that most ulcers are due to helicobacter pylorii infection, and ulcers easily cured.

Lyme disease is a fascinating story. A housewife fell ill. Her symptoms were considered psychosomatic. When her husband and children came down with similar problems, this was regarded as some kind of projection of her psychosomatic complaint. She was eventually able to convince a physician that the only crazy thing was assuming that something psychosomatic could be contagious! Once the doctor gave them medicine they got better.

Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome is still routinely considered a psychiatric disorder despite the repeated publication of physical and laboratory abnormalities always found in victims of it. People who realize it's not "Yuppie flu" find treatments that help them get better. A lot of these are covered in this book since CFIDS is often caused by unrecognized mercury poisoning and I had a terrible time with it.

In less recent times, another form of mercury poisoning - acrodynia, or pink disease in babies - was endemic for 150 years until physicians recognized mercury as the causal agent. The disease was eliminated and all the babies got better by changing the formulation of infant care products that used to include mercury.

This book is the kind of book you'd expect a chemist to write - one that is mechanistic, interrelated, and views the body as a complex chemical factory to be measured and controlled by adding a bit of the right reagent over here, taking something out over there, and sprinkling on "magic pixie dust" where needed. This isn't the only way to understand things. It is just the way I knew how to explain them.

Progress in medicine is sometimes slow due to people's natural tendency to hold on to the old theories they learned in school. Medical school professors can be a bit dogmatic about the need to adhere to the theories they lecture on so authoritatively. It takes a while for what ordinary doctors see day after day in their clinics to get applied creatively to making people better, and even longer for this information to make it back into medical school lectures. I hope I have given you the best of both worlds in this book - a description of what actually happens to real people when they encounter mercury, instead of the theoretical response the average man is projected to have from what happens to little mice and rats in medical school experiments.

I've written this book according to a modern paradigm of medicine. This new paradigm consists of viewing the human body as a system where biochemistry leads to metabolism which in turn becomes physiology. The new paradigm is to see disease as a slow progression from health to death rather than the sudden onset of a "disease" once a certain number of symptoms occur. The new paradigm lets you use the best of both mainstream and alternative medicine to get well.


From the Back Cover
This book explains how the modern epidemic of disabling, incurable chronic diseases is due to unrecognized mercury poisoning. Many conditions, from Parkinson's disease and autism - widely recognized as terrbile afflictions - to those like chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia which, though equally serious, are disparaged as "yuppie flu" can be undiagnosed mercury poisoning. The book explains WHY mercury poisoning is widespread, yet seldom diagnosed. Proper diagnostic procedures are given so that sick people can decide what is wrong rather than trying random treatments. This book explains how to cure chronic mercury poisoning, what to do to control the problems it causes, and provides the real technical information needed for diagnosis and treatment in a straightforward manner. This down to earth book lets patients take care of themselves. It also lets doctors who are not familiar with chronic mercury intoxication treat it. The book is a practical guide to getting well.

AMALGAM ILLNESS: DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT
What you can do to get better
How your doctor can help

- Find out if you have a mercury problem
- Find out what you can do about it
- Find out how to get well!

Find the information you need to finally take responsibility for your own health in this book!


About the Author
Andrew Cutler is a chemistry and engineering consultant in the Los Angeles area. He has a PhD in chemistry from Princeton, a BS in physics from the University of California, is a patent agent and a registered professional chemical engineer. His research has led to a number of publications in chemistry, chemical engineering and space related journals.

He also has engaged in extensive self study in biochemistry and medicine due to assorted health problems coalescing into a devastating "mystery syndrome" his doctors were not able to cure - or even diagnose - for quite some time. After being able to work with his doctor to get better he decided to expand his professional activities to include writing about health topics.


Excerpted from Amalgam Illness, Diagnosis and Treatment : What You Can Do to Get Better, Ho by Andrew H. Cutler. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
MEDICINE, CONTROVERSY AND MERCURY

This is not the first time in the history of modern medicine that a very obvious disease was belittled and ignored. Until recently it was believed that ulcers were entirely psychosomatic. Ulcer sufferers underwent prolonged treatment, were seldom cured, and often ended up under the surgeon's knife. After years of intense criticism and ridicule - about 20 years after the research was published - it has finally been accepted that most ulcers are due to helicobacter pylorii infection which can be easily cured with appropriate antibiotic therapy. At least by the medical schools and licensing boards. Yet it is still common to find physicians who still treat ulcers by prescribing acid suppressors - as if they resulted from too much stomach acid.

Cholesterol was held out as the root cause of atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease for about 30 years during which the correct evidence that elevated homocysteine played a major role was ridiculed and ignored.

Older physicians still remember when "there was no such thing as Epstein Barr Virus (mononucleosis)."

And who can forget Lyme disease? A housewife fell ill. Her arthritis and other symptoms were diagnosed as psychosomatic. When her husband and children came down with similar symptoms, this was regarded as some kind of projection of her psychosomatic complaint. She was eventually able to convince physicians that the only crazy thing was assuming that something psychosomatic could be contagious!

Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome is still routinely considered a psychiatric disorder despite the repeated publication of physical and laboratory abnormalities always found in victims of it. When it can no longer be ignored, it is dismissed with a bit of namecalling - "Yuppie flu."

And in less recent times, another form of mercury poisoning - acrodynia - was endemic for 150 years until physicians recognized mercury as the causal agent. The disease was promptly eliminated by changing the formulation of certain infant care products.


Book Description
Amalgam Illness: Diagnosis and Treatment starts with a detailed explanation of why to consider amalgam illness to be something that some people must have by comparing the well known statistics for how much mercury people absorb from their fillings to the well known statistics of how sensitive different members of a population are to a given toxin. This is for people who really don't know if they believe in amalgam illness or not (the other material available is rather sensational and I can't blame anyone reading it for having questions) before going any further.

Amalgam Illness: Diagnosis and Treatment discusses how to deal with physicians if you think you have a controversial disease - especially if you have the great "luck" to be covered by a managed care plan.

A key section is devoted to diagnosis - how to tell if you actually have amalgam illness instead of something else. It is also possible to be mercury poisoned from something other than amalgam, and the testing and examination described here is diagnostic regardless of the source.

How to get the dental work done safely if you have decided amalgam fillings are the problem is briefly described - there is a robust industry of amalgam free dentists if you know how to look for them.

The use of drugs and nutritional supplements to get the mercury out of your system is carefully presented - there are some important factors here that are not well described in the previous books on the subject and not all physicians who claim they know what to do actually give good advice.

Then comes what turns out to be the major section of the book - how to treat all the related health conditions amalgam illness can cause so as to relieve them while mercury detoxification proceeds. Since amalgam illness is not widely recognized in the medical community, most people with it get pretty sick before they get motivated to bounce around between doctors and eventually end up in front of one who tells them about it. So most victims have pretty serious, unpleasant health problems (like fibromyalgia or severe allergies) and they really need to make these STOP for the year or two it can take to get fully detoxed and let your body heal.

There are extensive tables of what to use for different conditions, a description of all the drugs and nutritional supplements suggested in the book, and appendices covering things like what the assorted clinical laboratory tests you might get actually mean, what other helpful books are that you might use, and supporting information like what the chelating agents are and how they work.