Page 1 - Provocative Heavy Metal Test

Provocative Heavy Metal Test

Submitted by the International Autoimmune Institute & Bingham Memorial Center for
Functional Medicine

Autoimmune disease is recognized as a major health crisis in the United States. Today, 50
million Americans—80 percent of whom are women—suffer one or more autoimmune
conditions. Thirty years ago, only one in 400 people developed an autoimmune disease. Today,
one in 12 Americans—one in nine women—have an autoimmune disease. More women are
diagnosed each year with an autoimmune disease than breast cancer and cardiovascular disease
combined.

An autoimmune disease is a condition in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the
body’s own tissue. Some of the more common conditions include rheumatoid arthritis, lupus,
multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, type 1 diabetes, and ulcerative colitis or
Crohn’s disease, but the National Institutes of Health estimates there are more than 100 types of
autoimmune diseases.

David J. Bilstrom, MD—the Director of the International Autoimmune Institute & Bingham
Memorial Center for Functional Medicine—reveals the importance of proactive heavy metal
tests to determine toxicity levels in patients with autoimmune diseases.

Toxicity inside the body
Many toxins enter the body from the outside. And every cell in the body makes toxic by-
products of metabolism that must exit the body. Most toxins that are produced internally or come
in from the outside have to leave through the gut. There are some toxins, though, that leave
through breathing, urination, or perspiration, but most need to exit through the gut. For example,
we need oxygen. A person doesn’t get very far without oxygen. It is crucial to survival but the
toxic by-product of oxygen metabolism is carbon dioxide. The body has to remove carbon
dioxide or else it will poison the body.

“You have all these toxins that get produced that have to be eliminated from the body,” Dr.
Bilstrom says. “When the gut is dysfunctional, or we do not have the nutrients we need to drive
our detox pathways, we accumulate toxicity. With the accumulation of toxicity comes a big
driver of autoimmune diseases.”

What is a provocative heavy metal test?
Many toxins are water-soluble and are removed through urination, but the fat soluble toxins
invade fat stores and leech out slowly, which throws off the immune system. In order to test for
these toxins they must be mobilized out of the fat stores.

“With a provocative heavy metal test, we use a chelating agent that’s going to mobilize the
toxins out of the fat stores and into the urine,” Dr. Bilstrom says. “There’s tens of thousands of
environmental toxins that can get in and drive the body crazy that we can’t test for in the clinical
setting, but we don’t need to. If you’re having a hard time getting rid of the heavy metals, you’re