Why EDTA Chelation Therapy
By Richard Lewis
Before beginning to answer this question, you need a little background on EDTA, the active ingredient in chelation therapy.
You have all been consuming EDTA for years-at least in small doses.
If you read product labels, both in the United States and Europe, you will find EDTA in a vast array of preparations and products: creams, oils, soaps, ointments, bath preparations, hair preparations, fungicides, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, biologicals, foods, softdrinks, flavorings, animal foods, plant nutrients, metal cleaning solutions, scale removers, rubber coated fabrics, photographic agents … and the list goes on.
Chelation therapy remains the ideal way to flush out any quantity of lead from the human body.
EDTA is even an ingredient in the jar of mayonnaise found on your grocer’s shelves.
Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid is the chemical name for EDTA. Chemists love to use this long and hard to understand word, but the average person prefers to stick with EDTA.
German scientists first developed EDTA in the mid thirties to control the calcium in fabric dyeing processes. Without controlling the calcium in water used for the process, fabric dyeing would be blotchy and inconsistent.
One of the first medical uses of chelation therapy was in the treatment of lead poisoning. Rubin, Cignac, Bessman, and Belknap published a paper in a 1953 issue of the journal, Science, titled, “Enhancement of lead excretion in humans by disodium calcium ethylenediamine tetraacetate.” This paper discussed the value of chelation therapy as a process to remove lead from the human body.
For the last three decades, Herbert Needleman, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pittsburgh, P A, has been campaigning for the removal of lead from the environment and from people, particularly children.
He points out that lead poisoning has not been an unknown problem. Over two hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin described the effects of lead poisoning on tinkers and painters. A little over ninety years ago, A. J. Gibson, an Australian researcher, described the effects of lead poisoning on children.
In 1982, at one of The Center’s International Conferences, Dr. Needleman asked, “If large doses of lead can make you profoundly retarded, can small doses of lead make you a little dumb? More properly put, is there a threshold for lead?” How much is O.K? None, nada, nil is the answer.
Chelation therapy remains the ideal way to flush out any quantity of lead from the human body.
Dr. Needleman and others have found that any lead in the human body has an effect on every cell in the body and remains in the cell as a systemic poison until the lead is removed. Dr. Needleman and his colleagues, writing in a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine, said, “The data presented here indicate that exposure to lead, even in children who remain asymptomatic, may have an important and enduring effect on the success in life of such children and that early indicators of lead burden and behavioral deficit are strong predictors of poor school outcome.”
A report came from The Center for Disease Control about 12 years ago stating that lead burden in the body was a cause of hypertension, or high blood pressure.
Using this infonnation, The Center conducted a research study in 1985 based on the premise that if we removed the lead from hypertensives using chelation therapy, their blood pressure would come down. At the end of the study, the answer was yes; blood pressure was lowered by removing the lead burden with chelation therapy.
Another valuable piece of information learned from this study had to do with kidney function in relation to chelation therapy. Critics of chelation therapy often say that it may damage kidney function. We found that kidney function either stayed the same or improved as a result of the chelation therapy.
Chelation works for other types of animals besides humans. A few years ago, when the water got very low in the Minnesota lakes and ponds, the trumpeter swans began eating the lead shot off the now exposed lake bottoms. To save the swans from lead poisoning, veterinarians did surgery to remove the lead shot from the swans’ craws and then chelated the swans to remove the systemic lead. The swans are doing very well, now.
Cadmium, aluminum, and mercury are other heavy metals that are as damaging as lead. Cadmium can damage the immune system as well as cause high blood pressure at high levels. All of these toxic heavy metals are known to affect the cell membrane permeability, subcellular organelles, and the DNA. In short, you are better off getting them out of the body, and chelation therapy is the best way to flush out these heavy metals.
Chelation therapy also works very well to remove the free calcium from the body, and especially from the vascular system. This is not the calcium needed to maintain strong, healthy bones and other organ systems in the body. It is the. free calcium circulating in the blood that tends to deposit on the vascular walls causing hardening of the arteries.
When this free calcium is removed from the arteries by chelation therapy, the arteries become flexible again, allowing them to carry more blood each time the heart pumps. This lowered resistance to blood flow also tends to lower the blood pressure.
Heavy metal and free calcium removal are important tasks of EDTA chelation therapy. For more information about chelation therapy, check with the Gift of Health at The Center for books as well as for video and audio tapes covering the subject.
