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By
Colleen Huber, Naturopathyworks.com
"We
are conducting a vast toxicologic experiment, and we are using
our children as the experimental animals." -- Dr. Philip
Landrigan, Chairman, Preventive Medicine, Mt. Sinai School of
Medicine
"With
chemicals, it's shoot first and ask questions later." --
Al Meyerhoff, former attorney for the Natural Resources Defense
Council
"Years
of documents have shown that they knew they were hurting people,
much like the tobacco industry." -- Sandy Buchanan, Executive
Director, Ohio Citizen Action
"Historians
don't like to use broad political term like 'cover-up', but there's
really no other term that you can use for this." -- Prof.
Gerald Markowitz, Ph.D., John Jay College.
The above quotes are taken from a documentary entitled "Trade
Secrets: a Moyers Report," which examined the various trails
of industrial effluent through our air, water and food and how these
trails terminate in our bones, our fat cells, our brains and our
internal organs.
Common Areas Where Chemicals Lurk
Chemicals are ubiquitous and increasingly present in our homes,
cars and even our food. Thousands of new synthetic chemicals come
into manufactured consumer products every year with no safety testing
or public approval process. More than 80,000 new chemicals now circulate
in consumer products since the rise of the petrochemical industry.
Through our lungs, skin and GI tract, we are soaking up chemicals
that we'd be hard-pressed to spell or pronounce, if we could even
find out what they were.
Human fat tissue sampled in the United States has shown 700 chemical
contaminants that have not been chemically identified.1
Toxic Results to the Human Body
A Mt. Sinai School of Medicine study last year found that each
of nine volunteers averaged 91 chemical compounds in the blood and
urine.2 Of the 167 chemicals discovered among the volunteers
tested, 94 are toxic to the brain or nervous system, 76 are carcinogenic
and 79 are linked to birth defects. The volunteers tested do not
work with chemicals on the job, nor do they live close to an industrial
facility. Rather, they represent the average body burden of an ordinary
American citizen.
Furthermore, chemicals that are foreign to the body, or xenobiotics
(xeno = foreign or not naturally occurring) tend to accumulate in
the tissues over time. Worse yet, children playing on the floor
and breathing more air than adults, acquire chemical body burdens
faster than adults.
Chemicals in the Air We Breathe
This is not simply a minor disruption to optimal health. According
to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution causes 2.7
million deaths annually. And the EPA estimates that there has been
no "clean air" in the United States for more than 25 years.
Even relatively pristine areas are not immune, because global air
currents carry pesticides from the heavily agricultural tropical
regions even as far as the polar regions, where cool air sinks them
to ground level. This has given the Inuit a very high body burden
of chemicals, despite their remote existence in mostly wilderness
areas.
But as bad as that is, indoor air pollution is even worse. The
formaldehyde and other solvents leaking out of our walls, furniture
and especially carpets keep many, perhaps most of us, in a limbo
between good health and vague malaise.
According to a study in Effective Clinical Practice in April 1999,
three out of four Americans have a diagnosable chronic condition.3
Cleansing the Body of Chemicals
Against this bleak and despairing scenario, the emerging field
of environmental medicine, a specialty within naturopathic medicine,
is offering a means for people to reduce their total body burden
of synthetic chemicals. Patients with conditions that have completely
stumped conventional doctors such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue,
lupus, asthma, multiple sclerosis and migraines, are now finding
relief and reversal of symptoms through the various cleansing procedures
employed in environmental medicine.
Dr. Walter Crinnion, a naturopathic medical doctor and pioneer
in the emerging field of environmental medicine at Southwest College
of Naturopathic Medicine in Tempe, Ariz., prefers to use the term
"cleanse" rather than "detoxify." This is because
our enormous bodily burden of xenobiotics has so thoroughly confused
the normal detoxification processes of the liver that the liver
can make some chemicals even more dangerous in the attempt to detoxify.
Not having either evolved or been created to process these strange
substances, the liver quite literally does not know what to do with
them and in breaking them down can liberate even more dangerous
components. Therefore, the first goal of environmental medicine
is "avoidance," simply avoiding exposure to chemical toxins.
Failing that, as constantly happens, the next goal of environmental
medicine, is to grab the macromolecule, before it is broken down,
and haul it out of the body before it can do much harm.
Most People Wait Too Long to Seek Treatment
From Chemicals
However, most patients don't begin to seek help from environmental
medical specialists until years of bombardment with toxic chemicals
have taken a huge toll on their health. So what we are then dealing
with in many cases are the metabolites, or bodily-derived chemicals,
from the original pollutants.
The body's unfamiliarity with synthetic chemicals sometimes prevents
it from processing them at all, and they are simply stored in fat
cells, as the ultimate repository of strange items.
As a result, overweight people have even more of a body burden
than the rest of us.
Some of the most prevalent chemicals are the dioxins that are common
in pesticides, the volatile and semi-volatile compounds such as
styrene, xylene, etc. These chemicals are commonly used in manufacturing,
chlorinated compounds, such as DDT and PCBs, which are accumulating
not only in the foods that they are sprayed on, but all the way
up the food chain.
They become even more concentrated on the way up especially in
the big game fish of the Atlantic. Heavy metals are also accumulating
in our oceans and the fish there. These are some of the xenobiotics
that appear to be present in everyone.
Some of the cleansing processes involve coaxing fat-bound substances
away from fat cells. Since the brain is 60 percent fat, it is a
primary storage site of these chemicals. Mercury is very strongly
attracted to fat. That is much of the reason why children poisoned
with mercury, which is still in many vaccines and amalgam dental
fillings, show autistic and hyperactive symptoms primarily.
Mercury is also a neurotoxin, which means it is a slow poison to
the brain. It is also known to be associated with Alzheimer's disease.
How the Cleansing Process Works
According to Dr. Crinnion, the majority of xenobiotics undergo
metabolic changes, known as biotransformation, in which fat-soluble
compounds are converted into water-soluble compounds, which allows
them to be excreted by the body. For these compounds, Dr. Crinnion's
strategy is to help this excretion along, both by assisting the
normal cleansing processes in the liver, and by removing obstacles
to those processes introduced by other xenobiotics.
Many pharmaceuticals act as obstacles to the liver's cleansing
process. Also, high sugar consumption as well as protein deprivation
are both obstacles to optimal cleansing function of the liver. Various
vitamins, mineral and amino acid deficiencies also inhibit the liver
from effective cleansing.
What is the "Toxic Bucket"?
It is the human body, descended from eons of pure-air breathing,
whole-food eating, clean-water drinking ancestors, who lived in
perfect biochemical harmony with their earth. But the toxic bucket
is really the modern human body, descended from that beautiful harmonious
existence, now tarnished and contaminated with chemicals that enter
continually through every orifice and pore.
The assault on our bodies from the huge numbers of synthetic chemicals
in our environment is a life-threatening challenge for a planet
and its inhabitants that are not acclimated to such substances.
Thus, the most effective therapeutic approach for the chemical-laden
patient involves several steps: avoidance of further exposure, dietary
changes and cleansing procedures.
Naturopathic physicians (or Naturopathic Doctors (NDs) and Naturopathic
Medical Doctors (NMDs) are trained during four years of naturopathic
medical school in the procedures necessary to help patients keep
their "bucket" of toxic substances as empty as possible
and to help the cleansed body function as well as possible.
The directory of naturopathic physicians on the website of the
American Association of Naturopathic Physicians, www.naturopathic.org
is the largest database of naturopathic physicians in the U.S.,
where U.S. residents can find a local naturopathic physician.
 Colleen
Huber, 46, is a wife, mother and student at Southwest College
of Naturopathic Medicine in Tempe, Ariz., where she is training
to be a naturopathic physician. Her original research on the mechanism
of migraines has appeared in Lancet and Headache Quarterly, and
was reported in The Washington Post.
Her
double-blind placebo-controlled research in homeopathy has appeared
in Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, European Journal
of Classical Homeopathy, and Homeopathy Today. Her Web site, Naturopathy
works, introduces naturopathic medicine to the layperson and
provides references to the abundant medical literature demonstrating
that natural medicine does work.
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