Testing for Mercury Toxicity
From MercuryTalk
One of the most common questions we get asked is this:
"What are the proper tests used to help me determine if I'm mercury toxic?"
Unfortunately, this is a difficult question because the options for mercury testing are somewhat narrow and can be hard to interpret, unless you know what you're doing. Following are options and resources that may help you determine if you are mercury toxic.
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Find a Doctor To Help
Finding a Doctor that specializes in diagnosing mercury toxicity can be a wonderful help. Unfortunately, this is not easy to do.
Although there are currently "standardized" hospital tests available for mercury diagnosis, we feel that they are relatively useless because they don't report "harmful" levels until mercury levels are harmfully-high or even potentially fatal.
If you can find a doctor that specializes in mercury testing, and has been well-reported of by former patients (always get references), you may have found the best and safest way to determine if you are mercury toxic.
DMPS Challenge
A DMPS (Sodium 2,3-dimercaptopropane-l-sulfonate) challenge test involves being injected with a chemical (DMPS) which binds to and mobilizes mercury in your body. During the next 24 hours, a urine sample is collected and tested for mercury. The amount of mercury that occurs in the urine sample is used to determine if a patient is mercury toxic.
There is a lot of controversy about this test because when mercury is mobilized, it can redistribute itself in body tissue and cause additional damage. Many report getting very sick during and after this test.
We prefer to avoid DMPS because we believe the the redistribution of mercury that is caused by the sulphur component of DMPS (mercury aggressively binds to sulphur) causes redistribution of mercury. We (the owners of this website) both took 3 weekly DMPS injections—which were immediately followed by 50 grams of vitamin C—immediately after our amalgam fillings were removed. One of us became very sick. For this reason, we stopped the treatments. After researching DMPS further, we became wary of recommending it to any else, especially when other options are available.
Hair Testing
Hair testing involves taking a hair sample and having it tested for mercury content. This is becoming an increasingly popular way to test for mercury toxicity.
If mercury remains is in the blood for a reasonable length of time, it will begin to be deposited in the hair. The problem with hair analysis is that mercury is normally quickly removed from the bood through normal body processes and is excreted and deposited in various body tissues, such as the brain.
The body harbors mercury this way as a protective mechanism to keep mercury from being redistributed too much to other parts of the body. For this reason, you may be mercury toxic but still have low levels occur in the blood and hair.
Only when you reach what Dr. Hal Huggins refers to as "Stage III" mercury toxicity will high levels of mercury occur in the hair. This is because the body is no longer able to harbor the mercury or eliminate it at a rate that exceeds the rate of exposure. Unfortunately, by this time, most people will have experienced any of a very vide variety of dramatic symptoms ranging from Chronic Fatigue to Fibromyalgia and even Nearsightedness.
Hair analysis can, however, be useful to someone who is informed about hair analysis interpretation to detect mercury toxicity long before obvious symptoms occur. This is done by analyzing the amounts of other materials in the hair and recognizing "mercury signatures". Mercury causes a series of somewhat predictable body chemistry changes which affects what will appear in a hair analysis. Typically you will look for some minerals to be very low while other are very high, and if these occur in certain patterns, you can strongly suspect mercury toxicity.
The patterns to look for often involve several materials and a number of patterns. If you wish to interpret your own hair analysis, or if you want to help your Doctor who is not knowledgeable in this are, we strongly recommend a book entitled:
This will provide you with expert advice that is easy enough for anyone to understand yet lack no depth or detail for your Doctor.
We believe hair testing is a safe and effective way to diagnose mercury toxicity when you're armed with the right knowledge. Just looking for high mercury levels in hair is not enough unless you're already in advanced stages of mercury toxicity.
Blood Testing
Currently, numerous people get blood tests that are administered by doctors who are not specially trained in diagnosing mercury toxicity. Because (as explained in the section concerning hair analysis) mercury remains in the blood for only very short periods of time unless a person is in stage III mercury toxicity, blood tests will nearly always show no toxicity, even when toxicity does exist.
These people go on to be "diagnosed" with diseases such as Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Alzheimer's, High Blood Pressure (Hypertension), High Cholesterol and even behavioral disorders such as Bipolar Disorder, Depression, Schizophrenia and Autism without ever realizing what the treatable—even reversible—underlying cause really is.
We know several people who have been diagnosed and lived with these diseases for years, even decades until finally realizing their dental filling or vaccinations were the actual cause of the disease.
Superior to blood tests are hair tests because methods of properly interpreting hair tests have been established. Please see the section on this page about hair tests.
Symptomatic Diagnosis
Perhaps one of the most obvious ways to recoginize mercury toxicity is by the symptoms and diseases it produces. Because mercury interferes with so many body processes, it's truly difficult to know how it will manifest or what disease it will produce in a particular person.
We typically suspect mercury toxicity in a person when we see 3 or more symptoms that are known to be caused by mercury toxicity, and we have a known source of exposure, such as amalgam dental fillings or vaccines.
We determined that our myriad of symptoms were caused by mercury after researching the subject ourselves. After having our only-known source of mercury removed, our symptoms simply went away and our lives improved dramatically. You can read our story here: My Mercury Battle.
Please see a partial list of the most common syptoms mercury can cause here: Diseases_That_Mercury_Can_Cause
For more information, please visit the following online resources:
- My Mercury Story
- Amalgam Illness Yahoo Group
- Book - It's All In Your Head by Dr. Hal Huggins
- Amalgam Illness - Diagnosis and Treatment by Dr. Andrew Cutler
- Hair Test Interpretation - Finding Hidden Toxicities by Dr. Andrew Cutler
- Amalgam Illness Website
- Mercury Amalgam Illness MSN Group
- Vaccines - The Risks - The Benefits - The Choices by Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, DO
Disclaimer: We are not a doctors. We do not prescribe medication or practice medicine. No information we share is intended to prescribe medication or practice medicine, nor is it intended to prevent, treat or cure symptoms, conditions or diseases. We only express our opinions based on personal research and experience.
