Mercury Toxicity

Mercury is a neurotoxin, which means that in high levels, mercury can affect how your brain functions. This can lead to symptoms such as depression, brain fog, fatigue, and anxiety. Mercury’s toxicity not only affects the brain, but it can also impair how your digestion, kidneys, muscles, and lungs work, particularly by poisoning your mitochondria.

If it’s been awhile since you have had a biology class, the mitochondria are the energy-producing organelles found in your cells. Since energy is required in almost every aspect of our physiology, from digestion and detoxification to proper brain and muscle function, you can see that by poisoning these cells, mercury can impair the body’s ability to function optimally.

You will have an evaluation with one of the physicians in our clinic who will determine your toxic load or total body burden of mercury using detailed functional medicine testing. Listed below are three tests we look at to determine your level of mercury toxicity:

1. Mercury Tri-Test: This test is a combination of hair, urine, and blood samples (this may have already been done by your biological dentist)
2. Fecal Mercury Test: This test looks at how much mercury you are eliminating in your stool
3. Urine Mercury Challenge Test: This test is done with the chelating agents DMSA (dimercaptosuccinic acid) and DMPS (dimercaptopropanesulfonic acid) to determine your total body burden of mercury. You will have two urine samples taken during this test; one as a baseline urine measurement and one after 6 hours after you take the chelating agents. This tells us how much mercury you are able to pull out of your tissues with the chelating agents.

Looking at mercury in your body in these several angles not only gives us an idea of how toxic you are with mercury, but also which pathway to emphasize while removing it from your body. This personalized approach ensures that we make the detox process for you as safe, effective, and comfortable as possible.

Common symptoms associated with mercury toxicity include but are not limited to:

• Muscle weakness
• Mood changes such as anxiety and depression
• Insomnia
• Memory issues
• Numbness
• Tremor
• Headache
• Vision problems
• Vomiting
• Fatigue
• Irritability
• Metallic taste in mouth
• Bleeding or swollen gums
• Difficulty breathing
• Digestive complaints

The detoxification process that we have chosen for our patients is a slower, safer method with the oral chelating agent DMSA for its gentle abilities to bind to mercury and eliminate it. This is to minimize the uncomfortable symptoms associated with heavy metal detoxification which can include but are not limited to headache, nausea, dizziness, irritability, and fatigue.

After your physical exam and evaluation, you will start the detox process in several phases. You will meet with us at each phase to ensure that you are effectively detoxing.

1. Phase 1: Loading with fiber and antioxidant support. We want to make sure that you are eliminating properly to ensure an effective detox process. If you are not, we will need to optimize this phase with other supplements prior to moving on to the next phase. This is to ensure that you do not reabsorb the mercury we will eventually be chelating.
2. Phase 2: DMSA orally 250 mg for 3 consecutive days. After 3 days, you will take the next 11 days off of DMSA to allow for the mercury to move from areas of high concentration (tissues) to low concentration (blood). This allows for effective removal.
3. Phase 3: Every 4 months you will redo the initial urine challenge test to ensure that we are indeed decreasing your mercury load.

The total time for mercury removal should be approximately one year but the time may vary a bit depending on your total body burden.

You may wonder why we do not do IV chelation therapy for mercury removal. Many clinics offer it, however, this can be a very intense and not-so-pleasant process for patients due to the severity of side effects such as dizziness, nausea, vomiting, fever, chills, headache, diarrhea, burning at the injection site of vein, breathlessness, and decrease in blood pressure.

We have chosen to do a safer, gentler detoxification process orally. You may experience some detoxification side effects such as headache, fatigue, irritability, dizziness, nausea, and loss of appetite, but not to the degree you would with IV therapy. We take a lot of measures prior to chelation to ensure that these side effects are minimized.

Our goal is to keep you safe while you work with us through your mercury removal process. We know you live a busy life and understand that you want to remain as functional and healthy as possible through this removal process.

Of special note, if you have mercury amalgams (fillings) and are interested in removing them from your mouth and body, it is very important to work with a biological dentist and physician who understand safe removal techniques and proper detoxification methods.

Improper removal of mercury amalgams can cause serious negative health consequences and exacerbate the symptoms mentioned above. We work closely with Ann Arbor’s Dentist in mercury amalgam removal to ensure our patients have a safe removal process prior to the detoxification process with us.