Mercury, Arsenic, and Lead – OH MY!!
It was only a few years ago that the country learned with horror about a city an American city that was forced to find their clean drinking water in plastic bottles distributed by compassionate beverage manufacturers. That city was Flint, Michigan.
Many other cities, other states likely thought: “Oh my goodness, that’s awful. But surely, it can’t happen here.” However in short order, it did happen, right here in Newark, New Jersey, only 17.5 miles from the capital of Bergen County, right here “in our own backyard”, so to speak. People were told by government officials that if they wanted clean water, they needed to, “Come and get it!”
If any of you are by some crazy chance thinking that our own drinking water is not still full of toxic metals, dream on. This threat to your health and to the health of your family may be out of sight, and you may have put it out of your mind. Unfortunately, that will not take it “out of body” – your body, to be precise.
Toxic metals of all varieties abound in our water supplies and in the foods we eat. Government regulation to protect us is quite modest, at best. Left unchecked, even in a situation far less acute than in Flint or Newark, these metals can build up in our bodies over time, based both on our exposure and on our own uniquely individual ability to detoxify. Whatever is not detoxified readily in a given day and excreted via the urine or the stool ends up getting stored in the body’s fatty tissues, predominantly, but not limited to, the nervous system and the skin.
It would take another full article or more to review all of the many ways that heavy metals such as lead, mercury and arsenic (among others) can potentially ravage your health over time. An abbreviated list would include deleterious effects on the nervous system, the immune system (leading to autoimmune conditions), the GI tract (common), the endocrine glands and the parts of the brain that control them, and the reproductive system. If this were not enough, they are also potent carcinogens. All in all, it is surely not a very pretty picture.
Very few folks are aware that these under-the-radar killer toxins can be detected by easy, inexpensive testing. The Home Depot has traditionally offered a free at-home test for your water. And a urine collection lab kit ordered for you by a physician can readily identify the heavy metal load or “burden” in your body. Whether as a way to understand any medical symptoms you may currently be experiencing or as a way to unearth hidden threats to your long-term health, there is no excuse NOT to test and find out what heavy metals are buried inside your body.
The best news is that these metals can effectively be removed by the treatment process known as “chelation therapy” which can be provided at the offices of all medical doctors trained in this process. It is safe, painless, it works, and it can change your current health and protect your body’s total health going forward. With this opportunity to correct any toxic metal problems so fully available, it only makes good sense to act at your very earliest convenience to find out (to paraphrase the Capital One commercial): “What’s in YOUR body?”
Robin Ellen Leder, M.D. was mentored by Robert Atkins, M.D. of the “The Atkins Diet” fame, and has been practicing integrative/alternative medicine for over 30 years at her own office, A Better Alternative Medical Center, in Hackensack, NJ.
