Mercury in Stream Ecosystems

From Dr. Garry Gordon’s FACT E-mail List (January 7, 2010):

MERCURY IS EVERYWHERE in fish, water, and air along with other heavy metals, pesticides, PCB’s, etc. The attached report by US GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY should finally lead many more doctors into long term detoxification based medicine to treat causes not symptoms.

This special report on the testing of contaminants in waters across our country shows heavy metals are the leading contaminant in waters tested with Mercury alone nearly as prevalent as pathogens in the tested water. The fish all had mercury with an average of 99% of it being Methyl mercury.

“Fish-Hg concentrations at 27 percent of sampled sites exceeded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency human-health criterion of 0.3 micrograms per gram wet weight”

I continue to stress that although doctors are quick to diagnosis depression or some other reimbursable condition and write a Rx for some drug so they can move patients out of their offices in the allotted few minutes, it seems that almost no one is paying any attention to real causes for the common symptoms and illnesses we routinely treat today  with some “approved” drug (another poison) while mainstream medicine routinely fails to consider or simply ignores underlying causes. It is clear that this treating of SYMPTOMS and making diagnoses that are commonly used by everyone is the only way you can “treat” patients in the few minutes we allot to patient care today. If you are the outlier, you would actually measure the levels of toxins that contribute to most illnesses seen today, but immediately the insurance companies spot you as a deviant physician, i.e. you deviate from the norm as you actually order blood mercury on patients particularly those eating fish regularly. Then you put one and one together and would say that rather than making a psychiatric diagnosis or anxiety reaction or depression, you actually write a diagnosis of increased body burden of mercury or other toxin.

That diagnosis makes you at odds with what is considered usual reasonable or customary practices and the insurance computer program spots you and they try to wean you back to the nonsense medicine being practiced by your “colleagues” or your “peers”. So how to do good and not be pinpointed by insurance companies as a “deviant physician”?  No one else treats causes; those that dare to deviate from the “usual reasonable customary” nonsense medicine that many of us fear pending government based care assures us will be the norm for years to come.

This kind of inquisitive practice leads to you testing people for mercury or other metals in hair, blood and/or urine and you have fun with your practice again, as you start to see real improvement in your patient’s health. The trouble is, most patients today breathe, eat or drink toxins so once you start looking, you will almost always find a contributory toxin, and that makes your insurance company irate and your “peers” nervous.

Read the book DIAGNOSIS MERCURY by HIGHTOWER and understand that what that book says about mercury applies also to lead or to PCB’s or PBDE (flame retardants now in everyone and damaging thyroid function).

So once YOU start measuring what is really going on in patients instead of playing the ICD-9 code book just to keep things going the way your “peers” play the game, you will start to believe what environmental doctors know, namely toxins are near the top not at the bottom of contributing causes to ill health in really “solving” most patients’ issues. But no one wants to pay for doing IV treatments on the masses to flush out a lot of these toxins. So to avoid getting turned in to your medical board the best answer may be to simply put effective knowledge in your patient’s hands so that they learn about the relationship between their exposures to toxins and their health.

Then let them work to decrease their exposures, and put them onto safe oral detoxification programs such as Zeolite and/or oral chelators, as there is generally no major need for aggressive IV detox programs if we realize that whatever we do, lead will take 15 years to significantly lower in bones and that IV hardly shortens that time frame. But IV makes people function better, as the soft tissues stores in kidney, liver, heart, etc can be lowered more rapidly with IV than oral chelation so patients feel better faster.

But that is not real detoxification unless it is followed with a maintenance program because unless the program is continued for 15 years you still have high lead in bones that will equilibrate with soft tissues over time or, as in menopause when women lose bone that releases lead and increases many health problems like hypertension, depression, memory loss, etc. Bone loss means lead release into all soft tissues and brain unless the patient has been on Zeolite or oral chelators for years.

Remember if you start out with 1000 times too much lead, as we all have now in our bones, and your stay on Zeolite or oral chelation for 7.5 years you still have 500 times too much bone lead, as you need the full 15 years of remodeling bone while on a program that consistently moves out more lead each day than you take in by breathing, drinking and/or eating. Thus, we need to put Environmental Medicine in the hands of the informed public, and in that regard, the only reason to measure the levels of toxins is to protect the public from useless nostrums that will do nothing to lower the levels of heavy metals and organic toxins found in anyone appropriately tested today.

Please NEVER tell a patient that they have no lead or mercury problem, as that totally ignores the facts!  We all are born with over 1000 times higher bone lead levels than were found in any bones a few hundred years ago. See all the research I have collected on my website.

Harvard offers Bone Lead Testing but since there is wide spread agreement today that there is no safe level of lead or mercury, if you can put an effective form of Zeolite on the table next to the salt and pepper, everyone would benefit from consuming the Zeolite whenever they eat, or drink or breathe. Read this report to see more about the levels of pesticides in all waterways, which of course will also be in any fish consumed from those waters.

Garry F. Gordon MD,DO,MD(H)
President, Gordon Research Institute
www.gordonresearch.com

http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/mercury/

Mercury in Stream Ecosystems

The NAWQA Program is studying mercury cycling in watersheds across the Nation to build an understanding of how natural features and human activities affect the transformation, transport, and bioaccumulation of mercury in stream ecosystems. As of August 2008, mercury was the second leading cause of stream impairment throughout the Nation (USEPA 303(d) list). Methylmercury is a neurotoxin that is biomagnified in aquatic food webs so that piscivorous fish and wildlife, and humans that consume fish, are potentially at greater risk of exposure to methylmercury. USGS data and research may aid in the development of more rigorous models that relate water quality to mercury bioaccumulation, thereby enhancing capabilities for predicting mercury contamination in fish.

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