Mercury Detox Using Nutritional Balancing

Even though this is a trading blog, Mercury Detox, Phase 2 has gradually become one of its most popular posts. But I can't recommend it anymore.

So to help those interested, this post is a follow up. From now on I intend this version to replace the previous Phase 2 post (which will remain as-is for comparison).
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***UPDATE: 4/23/2016
This post continues to be widely read, so I've provided a brief update of my progress.

Also, all the links have been updated to open in separate web pages. I hope that's easier.

Nutritional Balancing is still working great for me. After all the hard work I've put in, progress is now happening faster and faster, which is exciting and gratifying.

Additionally, it's not about mercury anymore (or the mystery culprit, copper); it's about all the major toxic metals and all the supportive minerals.

For example, went through a rough patch recently, and a hair retest showed I dumped nickel, aluminum, iron, and mercury, while copper is now in a good range -- all of which coincided with improvements in the good minerals.

So if you think you've just got a mercury problem, it's quite likely you could have a toxic metals problem and a possible nutritional deficit. Metals love to mimic the minerals that the body truly needs. It's therefore a good chance that your body has assimilated much more than just mercury while trying remain balanced.

Dr. Wilson likes to say it's similar to using original car parts versus after-market parts. After years of substitute parts, eventually you end up with a different car, and it takes time to get it back to brand new condition. This is discussed later.

Speaking of Dr. Wilson, one thing that I dislike -- and do not support -- is his foray into politics, religion, and lots of other 3rd-rail subjects which seem to distract from his excellent work. If that bothers you too, try to stick to the science behind his Nutritional Balancing programs and chances are you'll do fine. That's where Wilson is second to none, in my opinion.

Or, you can go to Nutritionalbalancing.org.
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This post discusses mercury detox using Nutritional Balancing.

Having used it now for almost four years, it's what I do recommend, because it works much better than any alternative I've found.

Nutritional Balancing is the science of balancing the major minerals and trace elements in your body using precise laboratory analysis of your hair. It is basically a Paleo diet -- lots of vegetables and some animal protein -- combined with targeted and balanced supplementation, hence nutritional balancing.

The bottom line is that by simply balancing your body chemistry, literally hundreds of physical, mental, and even spiritual challenges can be healed on their own. Sounds incredible but it's what I've experienced these past few years. Bad things like mercury toxicity just fade away. So do things like impatience and bad moods. It's been almost easy, but not without a lot of hard work.

Once your mineral levels are determined (and more importantly the ratios between them), a targeted approach is followed using only what is needed. This keeps costs low and avoids a shotgun approach that can actually cause even more problems.

Shotgun approach . . . $$$$

Targeted approach

Since your blood and saliva can literally change from minute to minute depending on your emotions or what you've just eaten or imbibed, your hair is a much more stable and accurate representation of your overall body chemistry.

Every 3 or 4 months you test your hair again. Each time only targeted supplements are used as your body shifts. The diet stays the same: pretty much just protein and lots of cooked vegetables.

The amazing part, in addition to discovering the mineral levels and ratios, is the "patterns" that are revealed and what they suggest not only physically, but even mentally and spiritually. First quantified by Dr. Paul Eck, the biochemist who pioneered hair analysis 40 years ago, and expanded upon by his student, Dr. Lawrence Wilson, the patterns are amazingly accurate, and act as an additional diagnostic tool. Through analysis of hundreds of thousands of hair samples, specific patterns have been observed such as:

Basic Burnout

Beam Me Up, Scottie

Bowl Pattern

Calcium Shell

Four Lows

Serious Patterns On A Hair Mineral Analysis

Stress From Within And Without

Trying Hard To Stay Afloat

These are just a sampling. Some may sound familiar or maybe describe someone you know, but each pattern revealed by your hair test can point the way to a much deeper understanding of yourself than an ordinary symptoms-based approach.

Nutritional Balancing also recognizes the concept of compensation. Your body is self-regulating and operates with great wisdom and has hundreds of ways to protect itself from harm. If your body runs low of a certain mineral it can compensate for it by substituting another one, especially when under stress. This is much like using parts from one car on another. They may fit, but they're not original. The scary thing is that this is how the body accumulates toxic metals. Toxic metals can mimic many vital minerals in our bodies. So while compensation starts out as a way to achieve homeostasis, over time this can lead to problems.

Therefore it is the body's compensation for mineral deficiency that causes the slow decline in health that most consider to be the natural aging process. Nutritional Balancing is the process of reversing these effects through balance.

Because of compensation, you may think you have a certain health problem, but it can be something completely different. Such was the case with me. I thought all my health problems were due to mercury. I was only partially correct. Believe it or not, it was copper, adrenals, liver, and thyroid. And it still is.

Copper? Yes. And it’s been way worse for me to deal with than mercury. Again, getting rid of the excess mercury in my body while doing Nutritional Balancing has been the easy part. I haven’t really noticed it at all. But what I thought were headaches caused by mercury were actually (and still are) caused by copper and other metals leaving my body.

These excruciating, migraine-type headaches can put me out of commission for an entire day, or keep me up at night with insomnia -- I'll feel incredibly exhausted and tired but can't quite cross the sleep barrier, as if I've forgotten how. Then the next day is very difficult.

So be careful. Avoid the temptation to focus solely on mercury removal and miss the real culprit. You may only know the real culprit by a precise laboratory analysis of your hair. You may be low in sodium and potassium giving you a low Na/K ratio, otherwise known as a low Vitality Ratio. This can cause you to retain too much biounavailable calcium which can make it harder for your body to detoxify, creating what's called a Calcium Shell which can cause you to become blocked.

(Biounavailable means that while you may appear to have a lot of calcium, for example, it's unavailable to your tissues, and so you are actually deficient of it and need to supplement it, which is counter intuitive.)

The point is that everything I wrote in the original post "Mercury Detox Phase 2" is no longer recommended.

By all means undertake Phase 1 – have your mercury fillings removed if you have them – but then consider using Nutritional Balancing as your next step. Save your money and skip the shotgun. Then uncover what's really going on.

This is not to say that Nutritional Balancing is a cakewalk. It’s not always easy, but true healing never is, and the process of ridding your body from the cumulative effects of decades of imbalance can be challenging at times. This has been the case for me during the past few years that I've been doing it.

Early on, I was too optimistic about how soon I’d feel great. For instance, I set a very ambitious goal for my trading during my first year of NB and kind of wish I hadn't put myself under that much stress. Largely I have felt better, but there have been many times that I've been put to the test. This blog has strangely been a benefit many times because it took the focus away from my difficulties. Plus it forced me to maintain the same voice through good times and bad times. Maintaining an even keel helped me personally even when work was sometimes the last thing I wanted to do.

When you give your body a chance to heal deeply, it goes for it. It virtually shuts down at times while it goes into the shop for repairs. Then there will be times that you feel tremendous. For me, I've had to endure many more headaches than I bargained for. But I know that headaches just mean that my body is eliminating excess metals and that that's good, plus I now have better ways to deal with them.

By far the most difficult thing besides dealing with copper removal (which causes the headaches) has been deal with something called adrenal burnout. This is something that is not dealt with, or even recognized, by the medical establishment.

Since it is possible that you may be suffering from adrenal burnout without knowing, I will share some personal details, some of which are difficult.

The short version is that by overworking, overstressing, and overliving, my immunity was lowered and I caught a very common virus -- Epstein-Barr -- which normally the body is able to resist. Stress, long hours, and probably the nutritional deficits of a modern lifestyle, made it easier for the virus to get a foothold.

Soon I was tired all the time and couldn't figure out why. Epstein-Barr is closely related to mononucleosis and is nicknamed "adult mono." Like mono (also called the "sleeping sickness"), it causes extreme fatigue, basically because it attacks the liver. The liver is one of the most important organs in the human body, involved in at least 500 body functions, and when it can't do its job its only warning is fatigue.

Like most people I didn't get the warning. I got Starbucks.

Coffee worked for a short while in ever larger amounts until one day, instead of feeling a burst of energy, I felt an overwhelming need to sleep. I closed my office door and passed out for an hour and a half. I woke up exhausted and terrified.

A few days later I couldn't even get out of bed.

I had a beautiful girlfriend, a successful career in advertising, a cool loft apartment in New York City, and one by one had to leave them all.

A short while later during the internet bubble, amazingly, I made nearly a million dollars on a stock (dumb luck) and slowly lost nearly all of it over the course of the next year (best lesson ever).

A short while after that a former girlfriend happened to be on the 94th floor of World Trade Center tower 1 as a jet airplane struck the 93rd floor and the building later crumbled to the ground.

A few years after that I broke my hip in an ugly ski accident.

It is only lately that I learned that this series of smaller traumas may have contributed to my adrenal burnout. First Epstein-Barr took out the liver, then the adrenals caved in, then the thyroid had to do it all. Suddenly I was in rough shape.

President John F. Kennedy had Addison's Disease, which is chronic adrenal insufficiency. It is thought that the traumatic events of his PT boat getting rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer in WWII contributed to the failure of his adrenal system.

Ironically I left one high-stress profession for another, but I didn't really have a choice. Trading became the only thing I could do because I could do it at home -- for years I couldn't get through the day without a nap.

Along the way, each doctor I went to failed to understand the whole picture. Regular MDs wanted to take out my thyroid via surgery. Ha! Alternative doctors sold me supplements, especially adrenal "support." It took me 15 years of ups and downs to learn that it was the wrong approach and was actually doing more harm than good.

Rest and nutrition allow your body itself to do the healing. It's a slow road, but it works.

I share all this because a burned-out adrenal system is what can cause the body to accumulate heavy metals and other toxins. So if you really want to get to the root cause of your mercury toxicity, consider your adrenals, especially if you "need" a coffee.

Here's an interesting fact: my sisters have the same number of mercury fillings as I had from the same dentist and grew up in the same house drinking the same water from the same copper pipes, yet have no issues with mercury or copper.

The larger point is this: in my opinion, a whole systems approach such as Nutritional Balancing beats a piecemeal approach. I find it to be simpler, less expensive, and far less time consuming.

Even as my progress multiplies, I still have a way to go, but I feel tons better and grateful for the changes that continue to happen, many of which are unexpected and have made life an adventure again.

May you find your adventure. Best of luck to you.
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Here is a link to a very good introduction to Hair Analysis:

Introduction To Hair Mineral Analysis
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If you are thinking of having your fillings replaced, here is a quick checklist for Phase 1:

1) Find a dentist that specializes in mercury amalgam removal.

2) A properly fitted rubber dam is a must.

3) High-speed section is a must, administered by an assistant while the dentist is removing each filling.

4) A nasal cannula is a must to ensure a pure air supply while the dentist is working. Without it you can inhale mercury vapor and become very ill. This happened to me during my first session and it screwed me up for 3 weeks.

5) A low-level laser (cold laser) is a must to sterilize the surface area inside/below the tooth after the old filling has been removed and before the new one goes in. With old fillings, there can be low-grade infections and bacteria that the laser will eliminate.

6) Consider doing a compatibility test to determine your most biocompatible materials for the replacement filling as well as the adhesives used.

7) I chose CEREC overlays which most closely replicate natural teeth, and which have the same hardness as natural teeth. They are a bit more costly, but can save you time and money because they use a CAD machine to draft the overlay while you wait, eliminating additional visits.

8) Go slowly. Depending on how many mercury fillings you have, try to have them removed in stages. I had nine, and chose to have them removed two at time and then three on my last appointment. My dentist checked the electrical current of each filling to determine the most negatively charged ones (also recommended). Most of them were -3 or -4 but one was -25, so that went first. I swear I could feel the difference after that one filling was gone. But I wasn't wearing a nasal cannula, so the next day, and for the next 3 weeks, I felt pretty awful.

9) For some reason, I found the most dentists to choose from in Texas. I don't know why this was so, or if it still is, but it was the case when I had my fillings removed in 2011. I'm very lucky that I can take my work with me, so I did some "medial tourism." I'd always wanted to check out Austin, Texas, and that's what I did. It helped make a difficult time a whole lot more fun, and I got to experience a new place for two months.

10) Prepare for the mercury removal using a Paleo-style diet, or the one suggested by Nutritional Balancing which is basically just protein and loads of cooked vegetables. The protein especially will help because its sulfur-based amino acids bind mercury and other heavy metals. This is unfortunately why vegetarian diets are not recommended.

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