Detox
First, I apologize for not posting recently. We live at 9200 feet above sea level in the Colorado Rockies. Our house is miles from a paved road, power lines, or telephone lines, we heat mainly with wood, and we have livestock to feed and care for. The winter here as been especially hard this year, and so the spare time that had been available for blogging was consumed with survival. Hopefully spring is on its way, life will return to a more normal pace, and I can post more frequently again!
Two weeks ago I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Robin Bernhoft. I met Dr. Bernhoft last year at a conference on environmental impacts to reproductive health. We sat at the same lunch table one day and he mentioned that he had been a liver surgeon for fifteen years but had to give up his practice due to his own toxic exposures. He retrained and became certified for environmental medicine, and today specializes in helping patients detoxify.
Carol: Tell me about your own experience with toxic exposures.
Dr. Bernhoft: In retrospect I attribute a lot of my difficulties to having left scrub solution on my hands and arms 600 times per year to keep infections down. I hadn't at all thought about absorption, yet I was absorbing gallons of disinfectants and antifungals and all kinds of horrible stuff.
Initially, I started having skin rashes. This is soap approved by the American College of Surgeons but it caused my hands to break out so badly I had to quit operating due to open sores on my hands. So I went on disability, but things only got worse. There’s a phenomenon in environmental medicine called the spreading phenomenon, where over time, as the levels of stuff build up in the body, you get more and more organ systems involved. I exhibited that pretty well. First I had the skin stuff, and then my lungs started to check in. I had a lot of secretions and I would wake up fighting for air and coughing in the middle of the night. It was great fun. And then it got my GI [gastrointestinal] tract and I started having cramps and diarrhea pretty much 24-7. There were a lot of foods I couldn't tolerate and I lost roughly 35 pounds over a four month period.
I had brain fog at that point in time, too. A friend of mine who had been a general practitioner and would refer patients to me while I was a surgeon sort of dropped out for a while. He retrained in environmental medicine, so I was seeing him. I would come home from his office, and my wife would say, ‘What did Phil have to say,’ and I didn’t know. I'd have to look in my pocket for what he wrote down [he says with a chuckle]. It was rough, and I had to start changing my life radically.
By that point, I was studying environmental medicine myself, and Dr. William Rea, who is one of the giants in this arena, suggested that I start rotating my foods and figure out which ones were causing the trouble. I did that for a few months. While I figured out which foods to avoid, I also did some immunotherapy and started saunas and eating mainly organic food. Eventually I started getting better and over the period of a year or two, I started gaining some of the weight back and getting my energy back. Now I work out five days a week at karate and run about 20 miles a week.
Carol: So now you specialize in detoxification with patients who have often been plagued for years with troubles. Can you talk about detox?
Dr. Bernhoft: Basically, the way I see it there are three phases of detoxification. The first one is avoidance and that is pretty self-evident. Just staying away from stuff that is (or might be) making you sick is critical.
The second step is upgrading your liver function. Liver flushes, such as herbal teas that are designed to cleanse the liver are OK, but they don't really get the job done because they are just kind of cleaning out two or three hours of crud and ignoring years of accumulation that is stored in the fat in your brain and your kidneys and other parts of your body. Getting at the deep stuff is more difficult.
What I like to do in my practice is a genetic test. It is a panel of the genetics for about 23 detoxification enzymes which are involved in processing different families of toxicants, such as metals and pesticides. This test helps you find out what the person's specific weaknesses are, which then gives you a pretty good idea of the stuff they have been accumulating and the stuff to avoid. Most of these detoxification enzymes can then be brought up to speed with simple cofactors like vitamins and minerals that are carried at health food stores. Once their liver is functioning reasonably normally, then the cleaning out and healing from within can begin.
Step three is to improve the release and mobilization of toxins that have accumulated over years, and for that I prescribe things like saunas, massage, exercise with oxygen, immunotherapy if it's needed, chelating for metals if it's needed, occasional coffee enemas and colonics if they will help, Ondamed (which is a biofeedback machine for pain), and of course, dietary changes and various vitamins and minerals to keep stimulating the liver enzymes.
Carol: Anyone can do the avoidance part of this program, but when it comes to upgrading liver function and releasing accumulating toxins, you probably need professional help?
Dr. Bernhoft: Yeah, I think so. Actually I think the smart use of genetic testing is the wave of the future as far as medicine is concerned. One of the reasons we kill 200,000 to 300,000 people per year with prescription drugs in this country is that that information is ignored. If you give somebody a drug they can't handle, they don't do well. The panel we run at a cost of $479 lets you know exactly what your weaknesses are because everybody is different. It allows us to focus in on what supplements you actually need. You can spend an awful lot if you go to a health food store and buy everything they've got, and still not be getting what you need.
Carol: And they are ready to sell you all kinds of stuff.
Dr. Bernhoft: Oh, yeah! You very well may not need 95% of it. I had one guy about six months ago who was spending about a thousand dollars per month on stuff from the health food store. He had a lot of issues but we got him down to less than a couple of hundred dollars per month, so he paid for [the test] the first month.
One thing for people to think about though with these tests is insurance implications. The lab we use does it entirely cash up front. They don't allow insurance on this test because their fear, which I think is legitimate, is that if the insurance company pays for it they own it and then they can use it as a preexisting condition. We treat the results like Fort Knox. We have all this genetic stuff in a separate locked cabinet, which is a pain in the neck because it’s not in the chart. The chart is something that can be Xeroxed and sent to an insurance company and they don't need to know, so we keep it separately.
Carol: So how does someone find a doctor who can help them detoxify? I’ve read about people having really bad experiences from doctors who aren’t adequately trained in detoxification.
Dr. Bernhoft: You’re right, it can have really bad impacts if it isn’t done properly, and if you want to know what can happen if you go to somebody who doesn't know what they are doing, go to www.dmpsbackfire.com, which gives you a lot of stories of what happens with a drug if you give it wrong, if you give it too fast, or if you give too much to people. DMPS is a chelating drug that is very safe and effective when used properly under the protocols of the American Board of Clinical Metal Toxicology, but it can be very dangerous if used incorrectly.
So, for patients who are looking for help, there are a couple of places to head. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (aaemonline.org) is where you can look for practitioners who are trained in environmental medicine. If metals are the problem, there is also certifying board, the American Board of Clinical Metal Toxicology (abcmt.org) for docs around the country who are certified in this area. These organizations represent people who are trained to do detoxification, and chelation for any metal, safely.
Carol: Do you find in your practice that most people coming in to see you have metals high enough to actually cause a number of their problems?
Dr. Bernhoft: Yes, quite a few do. The government study NHANES, or the National Health and Nutrition Evaluation Survey, in 2003 suggested that one woman of reproductive age in six was carrying either toxic levels of lead or mercury in their bloodstream. That is the tip of the iceberg, because it has been known in research circles for at least fifty years that serum levels are very insensitive. They just reflect acute exposure and don't tell you anything about what the body burden, or accumulated exposure that is stored in fat and tissue is. So if one in six has positive blood tests, it is probably five in six that are actually loaded with the stuff.
There have been a number of series of tests done on cancer patients and virtually all the cancer patients were mercury toxic. Mercury is a hugely irritating metal that affects the entire immune system and causes all kinds of issues, especially neurologically. There is no “safe” level of mercury.
Carol: I heard on the radio this morning an FDA person saying something like, eat more tuna and don't worry about this silly mercury type of stuff...
Dr. Bernhoft: That is not surprising; the politics of mercury are kind of interesting. The dental association and drug companies [who put mercury in amalgam fillings and immunizations] have an extremely vested interest in avoiding the world's largest class action lawsuit, so about every three months you get a report saying mercury is harmless, the shots are perfectly safe, blah blah blah...
To put that in perspective, a bunch of us got the mercury out of 68 kids who used to have autism, and they are now normal. My son was not in the series, but he used to have autism, too. All these kids were autistic as diagnosed by their psychologists or psychiatrists, but now the mercury is out, and they are now normal as documented by their psychologists or psychiatrists. That is a very interesting piece of information.
I tried to get that published last spring in JAMA [the Journal of the American Medical Association]. I've written 24 peer reviewed papers in my life so I know how to write papers. It was a good paper. It took them 45 minutes to reject it. They saw the m word, mercury, which I intentionally downplayed--I said these kids have pesticides, metals, they have a lot of problems, they aren't excreting this stuff--but one thing that seemed to work was getting the mercury out. I sent it over the weekend, and they rejected it at 8:45 AM Chicago time on Monday morning.
So every three months somebody comes out saying mercury isn't an issue in autism. I say, tell that to the parents of those 68 kids, or my son, or the other 450 kids now in this series who are improving as the mercury comes out. Mercury is probably also an issue in Alzheimer's too. There are six animal models of mercury and Alzheimer's and they all look just like human Alzheimer's. The politics of this are pretty ugly.
Carol: Why do some people seem to be unaffected by toxicants and other people are devastated? For example, some kids have autism, yet almost all kids get the shots?
Dr. Bernhoft: There are an awful lot of things that are contributing. This is not some kind of secret: the CDC [Centers for Disease Control], in 2000, issued a gene-environment interaction data sheet, which stated that virtually all chronic disease is caused by the interaction of genetic susceptibility, and modifiable environmental factors. People that have genes which produce enzymes which are able to remove specific chemical efficiently generally don’t get into trouble. But if those enzymes aren’t so good, the body can’t clear the stuff out, and it accumulates and eventually causes disease.
I’ll give you an illustration: in the 1970s, in the Central Valley here in California, there was a disorder among farm workers called el muerte andando, the walking death, which they got from being sprayed with pesticides. Farm workers with high levels of an enzyme called PON1 were able to process and excrete the pesticides and they did OK. But those with low levels of PON1 got neurodegenerative diseases.
You see the same pattern with everything else. Some kids can handle mercury in shots, some can’t. Some people can life near a freeway, some can’t. Some people can handle solvents or other chemicals, other people get sick. We’re all different, and the Human Genome Project has shown us why: liver enzymes vary a lot. And that seems to be where a huge amount of disease comes from . That’s what the CDC was talking about.
Dealing with these issues will be the medicine of the future.
Dr. Bernhoft has a website at www.drbernhoft.com . He has written a number of interesting articles for patients that are posted at his site.
Two weeks ago I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Robin Bernhoft. I met Dr. Bernhoft last year at a conference on environmental impacts to reproductive health. We sat at the same lunch table one day and he mentioned that he had been a liver surgeon for fifteen years but had to give up his practice due to his own toxic exposures. He retrained and became certified for environmental medicine, and today specializes in helping patients detoxify.
Carol: Tell me about your own experience with toxic exposures.
Dr. Bernhoft: In retrospect I attribute a lot of my difficulties to having left scrub solution on my hands and arms 600 times per year to keep infections down. I hadn't at all thought about absorption, yet I was absorbing gallons of disinfectants and antifungals and all kinds of horrible stuff.
Initially, I started having skin rashes. This is soap approved by the American College of Surgeons but it caused my hands to break out so badly I had to quit operating due to open sores on my hands. So I went on disability, but things only got worse. There’s a phenomenon in environmental medicine called the spreading phenomenon, where over time, as the levels of stuff build up in the body, you get more and more organ systems involved. I exhibited that pretty well. First I had the skin stuff, and then my lungs started to check in. I had a lot of secretions and I would wake up fighting for air and coughing in the middle of the night. It was great fun. And then it got my GI [gastrointestinal] tract and I started having cramps and diarrhea pretty much 24-7. There were a lot of foods I couldn't tolerate and I lost roughly 35 pounds over a four month period.
I had brain fog at that point in time, too. A friend of mine who had been a general practitioner and would refer patients to me while I was a surgeon sort of dropped out for a while. He retrained in environmental medicine, so I was seeing him. I would come home from his office, and my wife would say, ‘What did Phil have to say,’ and I didn’t know. I'd have to look in my pocket for what he wrote down [he says with a chuckle]. It was rough, and I had to start changing my life radically.
By that point, I was studying environmental medicine myself, and Dr. William Rea, who is one of the giants in this arena, suggested that I start rotating my foods and figure out which ones were causing the trouble. I did that for a few months. While I figured out which foods to avoid, I also did some immunotherapy and started saunas and eating mainly organic food. Eventually I started getting better and over the period of a year or two, I started gaining some of the weight back and getting my energy back. Now I work out five days a week at karate and run about 20 miles a week.
Carol: So now you specialize in detoxification with patients who have often been plagued for years with troubles. Can you talk about detox?
Dr. Bernhoft: Basically, the way I see it there are three phases of detoxification. The first one is avoidance and that is pretty self-evident. Just staying away from stuff that is (or might be) making you sick is critical.
The second step is upgrading your liver function. Liver flushes, such as herbal teas that are designed to cleanse the liver are OK, but they don't really get the job done because they are just kind of cleaning out two or three hours of crud and ignoring years of accumulation that is stored in the fat in your brain and your kidneys and other parts of your body. Getting at the deep stuff is more difficult.
What I like to do in my practice is a genetic test. It is a panel of the genetics for about 23 detoxification enzymes which are involved in processing different families of toxicants, such as metals and pesticides. This test helps you find out what the person's specific weaknesses are, which then gives you a pretty good idea of the stuff they have been accumulating and the stuff to avoid. Most of these detoxification enzymes can then be brought up to speed with simple cofactors like vitamins and minerals that are carried at health food stores. Once their liver is functioning reasonably normally, then the cleaning out and healing from within can begin.
Step three is to improve the release and mobilization of toxins that have accumulated over years, and for that I prescribe things like saunas, massage, exercise with oxygen, immunotherapy if it's needed, chelating for metals if it's needed, occasional coffee enemas and colonics if they will help, Ondamed (which is a biofeedback machine for pain), and of course, dietary changes and various vitamins and minerals to keep stimulating the liver enzymes.
Carol: Anyone can do the avoidance part of this program, but when it comes to upgrading liver function and releasing accumulating toxins, you probably need professional help?
Dr. Bernhoft: Yeah, I think so. Actually I think the smart use of genetic testing is the wave of the future as far as medicine is concerned. One of the reasons we kill 200,000 to 300,000 people per year with prescription drugs in this country is that that information is ignored. If you give somebody a drug they can't handle, they don't do well. The panel we run at a cost of $479 lets you know exactly what your weaknesses are because everybody is different. It allows us to focus in on what supplements you actually need. You can spend an awful lot if you go to a health food store and buy everything they've got, and still not be getting what you need.
Carol: And they are ready to sell you all kinds of stuff.
Dr. Bernhoft: Oh, yeah! You very well may not need 95% of it. I had one guy about six months ago who was spending about a thousand dollars per month on stuff from the health food store. He had a lot of issues but we got him down to less than a couple of hundred dollars per month, so he paid for [the test] the first month.
One thing for people to think about though with these tests is insurance implications. The lab we use does it entirely cash up front. They don't allow insurance on this test because their fear, which I think is legitimate, is that if the insurance company pays for it they own it and then they can use it as a preexisting condition. We treat the results like Fort Knox. We have all this genetic stuff in a separate locked cabinet, which is a pain in the neck because it’s not in the chart. The chart is something that can be Xeroxed and sent to an insurance company and they don't need to know, so we keep it separately.
Carol: So how does someone find a doctor who can help them detoxify? I’ve read about people having really bad experiences from doctors who aren’t adequately trained in detoxification.
Dr. Bernhoft: You’re right, it can have really bad impacts if it isn’t done properly, and if you want to know what can happen if you go to somebody who doesn't know what they are doing, go to www.dmpsbackfire.com, which gives you a lot of stories of what happens with a drug if you give it wrong, if you give it too fast, or if you give too much to people. DMPS is a chelating drug that is very safe and effective when used properly under the protocols of the American Board of Clinical Metal Toxicology, but it can be very dangerous if used incorrectly.
So, for patients who are looking for help, there are a couple of places to head. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (aaemonline.org) is where you can look for practitioners who are trained in environmental medicine. If metals are the problem, there is also certifying board, the American Board of Clinical Metal Toxicology (abcmt.org) for docs around the country who are certified in this area. These organizations represent people who are trained to do detoxification, and chelation for any metal, safely.
Carol: Do you find in your practice that most people coming in to see you have metals high enough to actually cause a number of their problems?
Dr. Bernhoft: Yes, quite a few do. The government study NHANES, or the National Health and Nutrition Evaluation Survey, in 2003 suggested that one woman of reproductive age in six was carrying either toxic levels of lead or mercury in their bloodstream. That is the tip of the iceberg, because it has been known in research circles for at least fifty years that serum levels are very insensitive. They just reflect acute exposure and don't tell you anything about what the body burden, or accumulated exposure that is stored in fat and tissue is. So if one in six has positive blood tests, it is probably five in six that are actually loaded with the stuff.
There have been a number of series of tests done on cancer patients and virtually all the cancer patients were mercury toxic. Mercury is a hugely irritating metal that affects the entire immune system and causes all kinds of issues, especially neurologically. There is no “safe” level of mercury.
Carol: I heard on the radio this morning an FDA person saying something like, eat more tuna and don't worry about this silly mercury type of stuff...
Dr. Bernhoft: That is not surprising; the politics of mercury are kind of interesting. The dental association and drug companies [who put mercury in amalgam fillings and immunizations] have an extremely vested interest in avoiding the world's largest class action lawsuit, so about every three months you get a report saying mercury is harmless, the shots are perfectly safe, blah blah blah...
To put that in perspective, a bunch of us got the mercury out of 68 kids who used to have autism, and they are now normal. My son was not in the series, but he used to have autism, too. All these kids were autistic as diagnosed by their psychologists or psychiatrists, but now the mercury is out, and they are now normal as documented by their psychologists or psychiatrists. That is a very interesting piece of information.
I tried to get that published last spring in JAMA [the Journal of the American Medical Association]. I've written 24 peer reviewed papers in my life so I know how to write papers. It was a good paper. It took them 45 minutes to reject it. They saw the m word, mercury, which I intentionally downplayed--I said these kids have pesticides, metals, they have a lot of problems, they aren't excreting this stuff--but one thing that seemed to work was getting the mercury out. I sent it over the weekend, and they rejected it at 8:45 AM Chicago time on Monday morning.
So every three months somebody comes out saying mercury isn't an issue in autism. I say, tell that to the parents of those 68 kids, or my son, or the other 450 kids now in this series who are improving as the mercury comes out. Mercury is probably also an issue in Alzheimer's too. There are six animal models of mercury and Alzheimer's and they all look just like human Alzheimer's. The politics of this are pretty ugly.
Carol: Why do some people seem to be unaffected by toxicants and other people are devastated? For example, some kids have autism, yet almost all kids get the shots?
Dr. Bernhoft: There are an awful lot of things that are contributing. This is not some kind of secret: the CDC [Centers for Disease Control], in 2000, issued a gene-environment interaction data sheet, which stated that virtually all chronic disease is caused by the interaction of genetic susceptibility, and modifiable environmental factors. People that have genes which produce enzymes which are able to remove specific chemical efficiently generally don’t get into trouble. But if those enzymes aren’t so good, the body can’t clear the stuff out, and it accumulates and eventually causes disease.
I’ll give you an illustration: in the 1970s, in the Central Valley here in California, there was a disorder among farm workers called el muerte andando, the walking death, which they got from being sprayed with pesticides. Farm workers with high levels of an enzyme called PON1 were able to process and excrete the pesticides and they did OK. But those with low levels of PON1 got neurodegenerative diseases.
You see the same pattern with everything else. Some kids can handle mercury in shots, some can’t. Some people can life near a freeway, some can’t. Some people can handle solvents or other chemicals, other people get sick. We’re all different, and the Human Genome Project has shown us why: liver enzymes vary a lot. And that seems to be where a huge amount of disease comes from . That’s what the CDC was talking about.
Dealing with these issues will be the medicine of the future.
Dr. Bernhoft has a website at www.drbernhoft.com . He has written a number of interesting articles for patients that are posted at his site.
Labels: detox
posted by Carol Ekarius @ 7:00 AM
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