Environmental Medicine Unloads Burden of Synthetic Chemicals

[Guest guest]

The Toxic Bucket: How Environmental Medicine Unloads the Burden of

Synthetic Chemicals From the Body

 

 

By Colleen Huber, Naturopathyworks.com

 

" We are conducting a vast toxicologic experiment, and we are using our

children as the experimental animals. " -- Dr. Philip Landrigan, Chairman,

Preventive Medicine, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine

 

" With chemicals, it's shoot first and ask questions later. " -- Al

Meyerhoff, former attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council

 

" Years of documents have shown that they knew they were hurting

people, much like the tobacco industry. " -- Sandy Buchanan, Executive, Ohio Citizen Action

 

" Historians don't like to use broad political term like 'cover-up',

but there's really no other term that you can use for this. " -- Prof.

Gerald Markowitz, Ph.D., John Jay College.

 

The above quotes are taken from a documentary entitled " Trade Secrets: a

Moyers Report, " which examined the various trails of industrial effluent

through our air, water and food and how these trails terminate in our

bones, our fat cells, our brains and our internal organs.

 

Common Areas Where Chemicals Lurk

 

Chemicals are ubiquitous and increasingly present in our homes, cars and

even our food. Thousands of new synthetic chemicals come into manufactured

consumer products every year with no safety testing or public approval

process. More than 80,000 new chemicals now circulate in consumer products

since the rise of the petrochemical industry. Through our lungs, skin and

GI tract, we are soaking up chemicals that we'd be hard-pressed to spell or

pronounce, if we could even find out what they were.

 

Human fat tissue sampled in the United States has shown 700 chemical

contaminants that have not been chemically identified.1

 

Toxic Results to the Human Body

 

A Mt. Sinai School of Medicine study last year found that each of nine

volunteers averaged 91 chemical compounds in the blood and urine.2 Of the

167 chemicals discovered among the volunteers tested, 94 are toxic to the

brain or nervous system, 76 are carcinogenic and 79 are linked to birth

defects. The volunteers tested do not work with chemicals on the job, nor

do they live close to an industrial facility. Rather, they represent the

average body burden of an ordinary American citizen.

 

Furthermore, chemicals that are foreign to the body, or xenobiotics (xeno =

foreign or not naturally occurring) tend to accumulate in the tissues over

time. Worse yet, children playing on the floor and breathing more air than

adults, acquire chemical body burdens faster than adults.

 

Chemicals in the Air We Breathe

 

This is not simply a minor disruption to optimal health. According to the

World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution causes 2.7 million deaths

annually. And the EPA estimates that there has been no " clean air " in the

United States for more than 25 years. Even relatively pristine areas are

not immune, because global air currents carry pesticides from the heavily

agricultural tropical regions even as far as the polar regions, where cool

air sinks them to ground level. This has given the Inuit a very high body

burden of chemicals, despite their remote existence in mostly wilderness areas.

 

But as bad as that is, indoor air pollution is even worse. The formaldehyde

and other solvents leaking out of our walls, furniture and especially

carpets keep many, perhaps most of us, in a limbo between good health and

vague malaise.

 

According to a study in Effective Clinical Practice in April 1999, three

out of four Americans have a diagnosable chronic condition.3

 

Cleansing the Body of Chemicals

 

Against this bleak and despairing scenario, the emerging field of

environmental medicine, a specialty within naturopathic medicine, is

offering a means for people to reduce their total body burden of synthetic

chemicals. Patients with conditions that have completely stumped

conventional doctors such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, lupus, asthma,

multiple sclerosis and migraines, are now finding relief and reversal of

symptoms through the various cleansing procedures employed in environmental

medicine.

 

Dr. Walter Crinnion, a naturopathic medical doctor and pioneer in the

emerging field of environmental medicine at Southwest College of

Naturopathic Medicine in Tempe, Ariz., prefers to use the term " cleanse "

rather than " detoxify. " This is because our enormous bodily burden of

xenobiotics has so thoroughly confused the normal detoxification processes

of the liver that the liver can make some chemicals even more dangerous in

the attempt to detoxify.

 

Not having either evolved or been created to process these strange

substances, the liver quite literally does not know what to do with them

and in breaking them down can liberate even more dangerous components.

Therefore, the first goal of environmental medicine is " avoidance, " simply

avoiding exposure to chemical toxins.

 

Failing that, as constantly happens, the next goal of environmental

medicine, is to grab the macromolecule, before it is broken down, and haul

it out of the body before it can do much harm.

 

Most People Wait Too Long to Seek Treatment From Chemicals

 

However, most patients don't begin to seek help from environmental medical

specialists until years of bombardment with toxic chemicals have taken a

huge toll on their health. So what we are then dealing with in many cases

are the metabolites, or bodily-derived chemicals, from the original pollutants.

 

The body's unfamiliarity with synthetic chemicals sometimes prevents it

from processing them at all, and they are simply stored in fat cells, as

the ultimate repository of strange items.

 

As a result, overweight people have even more of a body burden than the

rest of us.

 

Some of the most prevalent chemicals are the dioxins that are common in

pesticides, the volatile and semi-volatile compounds such as styrene,

xylene, etc. These chemicals are commonly used in manufacturing,

chlorinated compounds, such as DDT and PCBs, which are accumulating not

only in the foods that they are sprayed on, but all the way up the food chain.

 

They become even more concentrated on the way up especially in the big game

fish of the Atlantic. Heavy metals are also accumulating in our oceans and

the fish there. These are some of the xenobiotics that appear to be present

in everyone.

 

Some of the cleansing processes involve coaxing fat-bound substances away

from fat cells. Since the brain is 60 percent fat, it is a primary storage

site of these chemicals. Mercury is very strongly attracted to fat. That is

much of the reason why children poisoned with mercury, which is still in

many vaccines and amalgam dental fillings, show autistic and hyperactive

symptoms primarily.

 

Mercury is also a neurotoxin, which means it is a slow poison to the brain.

It is also known to be associated with Alzheimer's disease.

 

How the Cleansing Process Works

 

According to Dr. Crinnion, the majority of xenobiotics undergo metabolic

changes, known as biotransformation, in which fat-soluble compounds are

converted into water-soluble compounds, which allows them to be excreted by

the body. For these compounds, Dr. Crinnion's strategy is to help this

excretion along, both by assisting the normal cleansing processes in the

liver, and by removing obstacles to those processes introduced by other

xenobiotics.

 

Many pharmaceuticals act as obstacles to the liver's cleansing process.

Also, high sugar consumption as well as protein deprivation are both

obstacles to optimal cleansing function of the liver. Various vitamins,

mineral and amino acid deficiencies also inhibit the liver from effective

cleansing.

 

What is the " Toxic Bucket " ?

 

It is the human body, descended from eons of pure-air breathing, whole-food

eating, clean-water drinking ancestors, who lived in perfect biochemical

harmony with their earth. But the toxic bucket is really the modern human

body, descended from that beautiful harmonious existence, now tarnished and

contaminated with chemicals that enter continually through every orifice

and pore.

 

The assault on our bodies from the huge numbers of synthetic chemicals in

our environment is a life-threatening challenge for a planet and its

inhabitants that are not acclimated to such substances. Thus, the most

effective therapeutic approach for the chemical-laden patient involves

several steps: avoidance of further exposure, dietary changes and cleansing

procedures.

 

Naturopathic physicians (or Naturopathic Doctors (NDs) and Naturopathic

Medical Doctors (NMDs) are trained during four years of naturopathic

medical school in the procedures necessary to help patients keep their

" bucket " of toxic substances as empty as possible and to help the cleansed

body function as well as possible.

 

The directory of naturopathic physicians on the website of the American

Association of Naturopathic Physicians, www.naturopathic.org is the largest

database of naturopathic physicians in the U.S., where U.S. residents can

find a local naturopathic physician.

 

Colleen Huber, 46, is a wife, mother and student at Southwest College

of Naturopathic Medicine in Tempe, Ariz., where she is training to be a

naturopathic physician. Her original research on the mechanism of migraines

has appeared in Lancet and Headache Quarterly, and was reported in The

Washington Post.

 

Her double-blind placebo-controlled research in homeopathy has

appeared in Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, European

Journal of Classical Homeopathy, and Homeopathy Today. Her Web site,

Naturopathy works, introduces naturopathic medicine to the layperson and

provides references to the abundant medical literature demonstrating that

natural medicine does work.

 

Dr. Mercola's Comment:

 

Contributing editor and future naturopathic doctor, Colleen Huber does a

thorough job covering the dangers of various dangerous synthetic chemicals

we are exposed to on a daily basis. Huber hits the nail on the head with

the best ways to treat people with chemical exposure:

 

* Avoidance of further exposure

* Dietary changes

* Cleansing procedures

 

For more information on this important topic, you could check out the book,

" Our Toxic World: A Wake Up Call, " written by world-renown physician and

author, Doris Rapp, which expands on this topic in great depth.