Was it Lyme Disease or Mercury Poisoning?

4 years after I thought I had beaten lyme disease I got knocked out by an overwhelming fatigue. It was March 2013.

It was like falling into a coma but being fully conscious.

The slightest endeavor was an enormous effort. I had to cancel all my obligations and responsibilities: I told people for whom I was cooking organic paleo meals that I wasn’t able to do that anymore. I had to stop taking care of people’s gardens. All I was able to do is lie on the couch.

I had turned into a living zombie: breathing and alive, yet dead.

Going to get groceries or going to get water from the water store just 3 min away cost me a whole day or two of mental preparations. I had to summon all my willpower to do basic things like cooking or taking a shower. I didn’t know what was going on, but I assumed the most probable cause was a lyme relapse.

So I started doing what I believed had beaten lyme once before: ozone treatments. First I took out what I thought was the biggest hammer in my O3 arsenal: ozone IVs.

Unexpectedly, I barely reacted to them. They neither made me feel better nor worse or just very slightly so. The ozone wisdom dictates that if I indeed had some form of infection (doesn’t matter whether bacterial or viral) I should have either felt a strong improvement after the ozone treatment or a worsening in which case it would have been die-off. But I didn’t. Doing ozone did not trigger the same response in me as it did years ago before i shot my first video “Ozone knocks out lyme in under 1 year”.

It was strange.

I also did not experience the same symptoms I had experienced around 4 years prior when I was convinced I had lyme disease: I didn’t have any of the former neurological symptoms like depersonalization or derealization, and no brain fog, or only minimal. It felt differently.

It was just a crushing, overwhelming, monstrous fatigue.

And difficulty concentrating. Keeping my focus while reading was extremely challenging for me. I spent watching stupid romantic comedies, reading celebrity news and watching brain numbing TV shows – after 10 years of near complete TV abstinence. Now it was seemingly all my mind was able to deal with.

So what did I do?

I started looking for answers to what was happening to me.

Adrenal Fatigue

Initially thinking that adrenal fatigue was some wishy-washy pseudo-illness of professional hypochondriacs, I came across the following description:

“

• Morning fatigue – not feeling awake until about 10 am

• Afternoon fatigue – sleepiness and brain fog between 2 and 4 pm

• Early evening wakefulness – a burst of energy around 6 pm

• Late evening sleepiness – sleepiness between 9 and 10 pm, but you resist going to sleep

• Nighttime wakefulness – a second wind around 11 pm that lasts until 1 am; if you were asleep at 11 pm, may wake up suddenly”

– that sounded like a typical day for me. And whoever wrote this didn’t even know me! Yet was able to accurately describe how my day looked like. How was that possible? Clearly, I was onto something here.

As a possible cause for adrenal fatigue some websites cited lyme disease. There it was, the explanation for what I was going through: this time around the lyme had for some reason taken up shop in my adrenals, creating a new set of symptoms requiring a different approach. I figured I was doing the wrong type of ozone: I had to get to the lyme critters in my adrenals. Adrenals, I read, did not have blood vessels – was that the reason why the ozone IVs didn’t show any effect? I had to get to them circumventing the blood route: I started doing ozone saunas.

The saunas were impacting me horrendously: in the beginning I could often not bear sitting in the heat for longer than 20 minutes: I felt a pain in my upper abdomen, nausea, eyes rolling back in my head, I was stomping with my feet, it was just excruciating. Pure torture. I was taking this as die-off and thought that I was on the right track: lyme critters were in my adrenals and I was killing them off with the ozone saunas.

So I continued.

I also did vaginal, rectal and ear insufflations and found myself again spending around 2-3 hours per day just ozonating my body.

After 6 months of doing this EVERY DAY, I did feel an improvement in the fatigue but not to the degree I thought I should have felt if my problem was a bacterial infection. The ozone didn’t seem to have the same effect as 4 years ago.

Something didn’t add up. And I still was not fit to go back to work.

Diagnosing Mercury Toxicity and Misinterpreting My First Hair Test Results

I had had amalgam fillings for probably more than 20 years and I had been fully vaccinated as a kid, like most people. I had the fillings removed in February 2011 but had never done any type of mercury chelation program. Was that what was going on? An issue I had grossly ignored which was now demanding my attention?

In June 2013 I decided to do a hair test. My mercury levels on the test were as good as non-existent.

My first hair test results from June 2013. Note the generally low essential minerals and as good as non-existent mercury (Hg) levels. (This is not the optimal hair test to properly interpret mercury toxicity. The test which can be used with the proper interpretation rules, Andrew Cutler’s “Counting Rules”, is the DDI Toxic & Essential Elements Hair Test.)

So I thought “Phew! I’m clear! I don’t have mercury poisoning.” I guess it was true after all that ozone chelates mercury, how else could I have stayed free of that metal after having had amalgam fillings for 20 years?

But what DID I have?

I still didn’t know.

What was strange about the test was that all my essential minerals like magnesium, calcium, zinc, potassium, manganese, molybdenum etc. were very low or extremely low with some random spikes here and there. At that point I thought I had been on the best nutrition on the planet: 3 years of paleo diet followed by 1 year of ketogenic diet. Shouldn’t that have guaranteed an optimal supplementation with all the minerals and vitamins my body needed? The hair test seemed to paint a different picture. But I ignored it, not being able to make sense of it at that time.

So the search continued.

And the daily ozone saunas.

By that time it was September 2013.

Andrew Cutler Method of Interpreting Hair Tests

Accidentally, I came across a unique approach to interpret hair test results (something a friend had pointed out to me months prior but which I had stupidly ignored, dear Mr. Bond) developed by Andrew Cutler a PhD chemist who recovered from  mercury poisoning using an approach he himself developed, and later wrote books about it.

Andrew Cutler was saying that one can be extremely mercury toxic even if the mercury levels themselves on the test are very low. The way to understand whether one is indeed mercury toxic or not is NOT by primarily looking at the mercury levels, but by looking at the essential minerals: mercury is the only known element which will cause a general blockage of mineral absorption, resulting in what Cutler calls: “deranged mineral transport”.

After reading this I took another look at my hair test, and sure enough, it fit the bill! All my essential minerals were low or critically low as if there was something wrong with my body’s ability to absorb them. According to Andrew Cutler only mercury could do such a thing. Could it be that I was not only NOT free of mercury but on the contrary, profoundly sick with it?

I could not tell so with 100% certainty because my test was not quite the right type of test to be able to apply Andrew Cutler’s interpretation rules, so called “counting rules”. For that, one needs a DDI hair elements test which displays the test results in a specific fashion and also uses the right reference ranges.

Here an example of the right type of hair test:

This is a ‘DDI Toxic & Essential Minerals Hair Test’; it meets the counting rules #1 and #3 as explained in Andrew Cutler’s “Hair Test Interpretation” book, which means it shows deranged mineral transport and hence with a very high probability mercury toxicity; in spite of the fact that the levels of mercury on the test are in the normal range.

I realized though that my non-DDI hair test offered a big enough indication for mercury toxicity, big enough for me to pursue further investigations: to try a few rounds of chelation and see how I would react to it. If I was indeed poisoned, I should react to the program. If I was not mercury poisoned, there should be no reaction. Luckily, all my amalgams had been already removed which is a prerequisite to be able to start chelation safely.

Andrew Cutler Chelation – The Answer to My Problems?

On September 19th, 2013 I started my first round of the Andrew Cutler chelation with 20mg of ALA taken every 3 hours, day and night for 72 hours.

The immediate reaction was a sore throat, feeling like I was coming down with the flu, and increased fatigue. All those symptoms abated or went away completely after the 72 hours. I took this as a reaction to the ALA and as an indication that I was indeed mercury toxic. So I decided to continue.

And I have been doing so ever since. As of August 2014 I have completed 44 rounds, or around 10 months of chelation. In that time I have made many mistakes and have done things Andrew Cutler explicitly warns about. It was scary at times. And I have gone through all the typical phases people go through once they start chelating mercury (see chart on p. 52 of “Amalgam Illness”, graph (e) ): initial improvement, stall phase, worsening of symptoms, another stall phase, and improvement again. Amazingly, this simple graph was not only able to explain and predict what was happening to me during chelation but was also seemingly able to explain good parts of my life. I was DEFINITELY onto something here …

Symptoms Which Have Improved Since Starting the Andrew Cutler Chelation Program

– fatigue

– ability to concentrate and focus

– ability to read more complicated texts

– motivation

– adrenal fatigue

– waking up shortly after falling asleep, having to eat in the middle of the night to be able to go back to sleep – I guess that’s part of hypoglycemia, be it real or fake, something that can apparently happen with mercury toxicity: one has the symptoms of hypoglycemia but blood tests do not show a blood sugar abnormality; or it can be real hypoglycemia, only that I seem to have those symptoms only at night, not during the day

– debilitating migraines (the type when it’s so bad it feels like someone is crushing your temples with a hammer whenever you move) and extreme irritability during menstruation

– procrastination (I know, It sounds like such a vague thing. How is that different form just being lazy? Well, you will know the difference when you experience how that feeling can be seemingly turned on and off like a switch depending on whether you take chelators and are ON round, or whenever you’re OFF round and going through redistribution.)

– depression (which I had mostly experienced during the first 3 months of chelation)

– stiff joints

All those things have improved to a great degree, and are constantly getting better, but are not gone yet completely. I intend to continue the chelation until I’m completely cleared of all the symptoms or until I don’t feel any reaction to the chelators anymore.

How long is it gonna take? I have no clue. How ever long it’s gonna take to become fully human again, as in: non-zombie like.

Have I Ever Had Lyme Disease?

I think so. But I’m not 100% sure, since I’ve never taken a blood test. Given that most of the tests are supposedly notoriously unreliable I never saw a point in spending money on something of so little diagnostic value.

I’ve been diagnosed mostly clinically by my doctor who treated me for joint pain in my knees.

Reasons why I think I did have lyme disease or some other form of bacterial and/or viral infection:

– I received the lyme vaccine ca. 10 years ago. The vaccine has been since taken off the market because of several class action lawsuits by people who had fallen sick after receiving it. Was it because the vaccine contained live bacteria which gave people the very disease it was supposed to protect them from? I guess we will never know for sure, but many people, including me, experienced symptoms after the vaccine which were associated with lyme disease.

– My first ozonated saline IV had triggered a dramatic reaction: my body had seemingly turned into glass, rigid, painful, ice cold and I was sweating at the same time. Half an hour later I had nearly passed out on the subway. Subsequent ozone applications rendered similar reactions but to a much smaller degree.

Until this day, I have no other explanation for it other than ozone killing off pathogens.  

So, yes I tend to think that I indeed did have lyme disease. But to what degree – it’s really difficult to say.

I think that the joint pain, feelings of having a veil between myself and reality (derealization or depersonalization) might have been part of lyme; or maybe it was candida. Which symptoms does the diet control which I have been following with just minor changes for close to 5 years? Is it possible that many of the neurological symptoms were induced by a reaction to gluten and excessive sugar consumption and not lyme? I don’t have enough information to be able to completely dismiss it nor to completely believe it. 

I also tend to ascribe episodes of air hunger or the sensation of not being able to breath to lyme disease or some other infection, since breathing vaporized diluted hydrogen peroxide (1% to 3%) completely reversed it.

But would I have still become sick with lyme if I had never had mercury amalgam fillings put in my mouth? Is it possible that the mercury had impaired my immune system to the point that it could not handle whatever other pathogens there were? Possible.

But then: if my latest episode of fatigue was not due to lyme but mercury, how do I explain my painful reaction to the ozone saunas? For one, sweat clears mercury out of the body, so it’s possible that that’s what created the bad reaction. Another possibility: ozone, heat and sweating will increase the metabolism which again will take the body faster into ketosis, which in turn can make candida go systemic creating pretty uncomfortable symptoms, congruent with what I have experienced during the sauna sessions.

What Symptoms Did Mercury Cause?

Looking back and knowing what I know now, I have compiled a list of some of my symptoms that are more likely to have been caused by mercury than by lyme disease:

– turning autistic during my late teens, basically not being able to read people’s faces or interact socially, near complete eradication of empathy

– OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, constant obsessive circular thoughts

– all sorts of other cognitive and emotional disturbances resulting in a very “jumpy” personality

– suicidal thoughts

– emotional impulsivity

– depression

– moodiness

– not being able to understand written texts even after repeated reading

– impaired mathematical skills (I used to teach math at university, later I had difficulty looking at simple logical problems)

– feeling anxiety 24/7

– digestive issues

– candida

– adrenal fatigue

– impaired immune system: I used to get sick 2-4 times per year, and each flu or cold would drag itself for 6 to 8 weeks

– allergies

– joint stiffness

– overwhelming fatigue

– have phases in my life full of plans and motivation followed by phases where I would fall into total procrastination and halt everything

– extremely dry skin

– tinnitus

– cold hands and feet

– tingling sensations in my legs

History Can Be Revised

Depending on what new information one comes across and what new experiences one has, it can shape one’s understanding of the past. We tend to get attached to various ideas about our health issues. Especially, if we have invested time, energy, and money in certain doctors or therapies. As I have found out the hard way, this is an excellent way to sabotage one’s health recovery and stall progress. The best way is to keep an open mind, not to assume anything, but to just test theories. 

Andrew Cutler is of the opinion that the majority of lyme disease cases really are misdiagnosed mercury toxicity. In light of my latest health journey, I tend to agree with him.

Over the past 5 years I came in contact with many people who think they have lyme disease or have been diagnosed with lyme disease. The overwhelming majority of them have a history of amalgam fillings or vaccinations or show mercury to be present on various tests.

That’s why I think it makes sense that before one decides to undergo expensive treatments in faraway countries on different continents, or to spend thousands of dollars going to see various health “gurus” or doctors and to undergo extensive long term therapies, to first rule out one of the most toxic substances in the world for one’s health problems, which criminally enough is still regularly used in medicine: mercury.

Resources

Often enough all that is needed is to do a hair elements test which one can obtain here or here for as little as $85. Together with Andrew Cutler’s counting rules explained in his book “Hair Test Interpretations”, your health history, and your symptoms you’ll be able to find out with a high probability whether it’s mercury that is making you sick, and not lyme. You can also join the Andy Cutler Chelation Think Tank on Facebook or the Yahoo groups Autism Mercury, Frequent Dose Chelation or Adult Metal Chelation to meet knowledgeable people who can properly interpret your hair test according to the Cutler counting rules.

Another great resource is onibasu.com. It archives all posts of the above mentioned Yahoo groups, many of which are by Andrew Cutler himself. Here an example how to use the website:

Typing “andrewhallcutler” “ALA” “flouride” in the onibasu.com search bar, checking the first three yahoo groups in the middle section and clicking Search! will render posts by Andrew Cutler which contain the words “ALA” and “flouride”.

I also highly recommend the study of the following website: http://www.livingnetwork.co.za/chelationnetwork/chelation-the-andy-cutler-protocol/ which has all the information necessary to start chelating safely.

If you have questions about ozone or want to share your experience, feel free to join the Facebook group “Ozone to Health”.

LEGAL DISCLAIMER

All of the material on this site is intended as educational information only in regards to alternative healthcare options that are available to the healthcare consumer.  The advice on this site are intended solely for informational and educational purposes and are not intended to replace your doctor. The FDA has stated that only medications (drugs) can cure an illness or disease. Please consult a medical professional if you have questions about your health.

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