Heavy Metal Toxicity

Hey there, this is Dr. Jason Shumard, with Integrated Wellness Center of San Diego, and the author of the Thyroid Epidemic, and How To Reverse Your Diabetes. So today I want to discuss a common topic that we see for a majority of the patients that we see. Unfortunately, most of them are not even aware that they’re even experiencing this kind of problem. Now, what’s interesting is the symptoms they’re experiencing, being addressed in the traditional model, whatever ability, they’re trying to fix those symptoms, but the underlying mechanism has not been addressed. That’s heavy metal toxicity. Now, many people don’t think about heavy metal toxicity, because it’s just not commonly thought about in this day and age, especially with some of the restrictions that we have. But we don’t what’s important about heavy metal toxicity is some of the impacts it can have on your body.

And so if you’re getting that constant exposure of it on a regular basis being compounded over and over and over and over again. Next thing you know, we see an elevator arsenic level, and that’s very toxic, and it’s a neurotoxin and can cause a lot of havoc inside the body. So very commonly, we’ll see that type of thing with khadem II and realize, well, where am I going to get cadmium? Now, depending on the scenario here, but cadmium is often found in Kevin’s found in smoking. So if maybe you grew up in a home where your family smoked, or maybe you’re a smoker, or maybe you’re in an environment that you’ve been exposed to smoking, this could be happening to you. So remember, when we’re dealing with heavy metal toxicity, it’s not about the exposure right now.

But what has been happening to compounds over the years, a lot of these heavy metals can stay lodged up in the body and continue to worsen over time. So it may not be a current exposure, it can be from something previously, which we’ll talk about why that could become a problem a little bit here, and then lead to the same thing, right? Sometimes we’ve been, we’ve seen through the news that it can be they found a lead in the water, there can be paint exposure, maybe you’re still living in an older home, or maybe you’re from an era where lead paint was very common, and toys and home paints. So these things can be happening inside your body. And like I said, be lodged up into tissues, you’re still experiencing these problems, even though you’re not getting any current exposure.

And that’s something I want you to be aware of, not all exposures are going to be current, we have to understand that our body can hold on to these things and just stay in our body for long periods of time. Now, the biggest key component of all these heavy metal toxins comes down to one word, detoxification. And this is an important word, because if your body is not doing a good enough job, detoxifying, this is how these heavy metals continue to linger inside your body. So our body has multiple levels of detoxification, the most, the biggest one is going to be our liver, gallbladder, gi urine, and so kidneys and skin in the sun, partially through the hair exposure as well. So if your ability to detoxify is deficient, where you’re going to increase these levels of these types of heavy metals.

It’s just going to continue to make things worse inside your body. So what’s going to happen? Well, next thing, you know, you’re going to start having these elevated symptoms that I referred to. So you can start having things like brain fog, memory loss, increasing the risk of things like dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, gastrointestinal dysfunction, fatigue, sleep issues, joint pain, you can have muscle cramping, then The list goes on, and on and on. So there are many types of symptoms of neuropathy that can be exposed to these types of heavy metal toxins. Now, what’s really important as well, is that these types of toxins can increase the risk that it can increase the risk of autoimmune disease. So one of the major things that we see in some research has been showing the number one cause of death.

The United States is an autoimmune disease because it increases inflammation, which can cause cardiovascular problems, cancers, strokes, diabetes, I mean, you name it, it can, it can contribute to many things. So when you have these heavy metal toxins, what can happen is it starts to ramp up the immune system because the immune system is going to try to handle this right. But if your body can’t get rid of it, these heavy metals will continue to lodge up in your body, you keep resurfacing over and over and over and over again, constantly antagonizing the immune system constantly wrapping up, and the next thing you know, the body starts or the immune system starts attacking the body. So we develop conditions like Hashimoto’s. We know the thyroid problems if you will, but it’s a thyroid condition.

Where the immune system is attacking and destroying the thyroid and roughly about 90% of all thyroid cases are actually due to Hashimoto’s which is an autoimmune disease. We can see things like Lupus type one diabetes, right we can see celiac. We can see things like celiac, we can see things like Ms. And name it’s you can name all the autoimmune conditions. So traditionally in the traditional model, The treatment of these types of autoimmune conditions are steroids. Right? Our immune suppressors, well, how is that impacting and helping the body. So let’s just say, for example, that you have some of these elevated heavy metals. And these are ramping up the immune system, man, the immune system has been constantly trying to attack these metals, and your body’s constantly trying to get rid of them.

And eventually, over time, it gets riled up so much that starts attacking your own body. And the next thing you know, you get diagnosed with one of these conditions. Now, doesn’t it make sense to start to analyze to see if heavy metals could be a component of why you have this underlying autoimmune disease? Of course, it does. But unfortunately, this is not happening in the traditional model. Traditionally speaking, it’s using pharmaceutical drugs to suppress the immune system by using steroids to lighten up the immunological attack attacks, and not fixing the problem. And this is the focus of what we do in the practice. We dig in, we dig in, we dig into we find out what is going on with your specific condition. See, the diagnosis you have whatever that might be is the diagnosis, the symptoms you’re having, or the symptoms.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be, pay attention to them, and be better and understand them. But we don’t want to focus on treats based upon symptoms and disease, we want to address the underlying mechanisms. So if your body has any elevated heavy metal toxins, we can assume your ability to detoxify is suppressed. So what do we have to do, we have to get those heavy metals out. And by doing that, we can help you improve your detoxification skills, which is thinking to allow your body to get rid of these heavy metals, get rid of them on its own, so you can start to heal, can start to calm down the immunological reactions and other symptoms you’re experiencing as well.

This is how we’ve been able to help individuals with multiple different types of autoimmune diseases like Hashimoto, our diabetics, our cognitive decline, and patients get better symptomatically. And physiologically, because we’re addressing specific problems, like heavy metal toxins, I can probably do a two-hour presentation on the multiple things that we help within our office, not specifically to their symptoms, or disease, or what’s causing the symptoms and disease. And 100% focus should be on where functions are being lost, which is triggering the reactions inside the body.

See, heavy metals are a neurotoxin. That’s one component, which means it literally destroys the nerves in your brain. So many individuals that are dealing with things like dementia, memory loss, brain, fog, Alzheimer’s, they’re dealing with heavy metal toxicity. I think it’s important that we understand, because some of the things you’re experiencing right now, some of the symptoms, some of the conditions, the diseases, that may be being treated through a pharmaceutical model, maybe helping you symptomatically. But the underlying problem of heavy metal toxicity could be a problem you’re experiencing that no one’s analyzed or tested yet. So, let’s talk about some of the common ones that we’ve seen here in the crack. So common ones that we’ll see are things like arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and OLED.

So, now you’re thinking to yourself, how can I get exposed to these types of things, maybe like mercury you’re a little more familiar with because we can get that from fish. It can be from cavities. You know, we see things like, previously in the past dentists, maybe some still do to this day, use mercury for fillings. I was just having a conversation with a colleague recently where their spouse had multiple fillings in her mouth. And they tried to remove the fillings and unfortunately, didn’t do a good enough job to remove the fillings properly. And she started getting overloaded with mercury, essentially a Mercury toxic load. And it started really impacting her body and causing a lot of problems here. So you know, we can see things like fish from the ocean, things like deep water, fish, you know, sharks, and tuna.

In addition, are Halibut the sort of fish that are more bottom feeders, typically, you’re going to have more mercury loads than other types of fish like salmon, herring, anchovies, those things are going to have less type of mercury. Now from your cavities, this is going to be more of an inorganic Mercury, again. So it’s going to be more of an organic form like fish or environments than the inorganic is going to be the ones your teeth. And that’s a very major issue. Because if you have mercury fillings, the mercury could be leaching from your teeth or from drilling on the teeth that can cause that leaching. And next thing, you know, you’ve got this constant exposure, and your body’s being overloaded. Again, you may not even know that, but maybe you’re experiencing some brain fog.

Maybe you’re having some fatigue, maybe you’re starting to have some justification, you know, you can’t sleep as well as you used to, or some digestive issues, will the typical reaction, there’s going to maybe give you medication for the sleep or medication, for your digestive issues, and so on. So oftentimes, these things can be happening under the surface. They’re just not being investigated as traditional evaluation. So, let’s talk about arsenic. This is interesting because arsenic has been found to be in rice. And so people don’t realize how much rice that they’re eating, especially for those of you who are watching this video who are gluten-free. A lot of the gluten-free products have rice in them and how much of that are you eating because you’re quote-unquote, eating gluten-free. It’s very common to see people eating a lot more rice than they traditionally think.