Benefits of EDTA Chelation
EDTA ( EthyleneDiamineTetraAcetic Acid) is a synthetic amino acid related to vinegar. EDTA was developed by the Germans in 1931 to reverse heavy-metal poisoning from the ingestion of lead, mercury, aluminum, cadmium, and more. This page contains several different articles about the effectiveness of EDTA Chelation Therapy for cardiovascular disease.
EDTA Benefits and Uses
It removes the effects of a heart attack.
It removes or reduces angina pectoris—chest pains.
It removes or reduces cardiac stress intolerance.
It reduces shortness of breath in coronary artery disease.
It can bring back the elderly from senility, and improve memory and reduce the incidence of Pick’s Atrophy and Alzheimer’s disease.
It reduces blood pressure in about 60% of high blood pressure patients.
It can eliminate intermittent claudication (leg cramps and leg pain and numbness due to poor circulation).
It can reverse diabetic gangrene. It can restore impaired vision, particularly in the diabetic whose suffering from macular degeneration.
It improves memory, can prevent the deposition of cholesterol in the liver, it reduces blood cholesterol levels, it reverses toxic effects from digitalis excess.
It can convert and normalize 50% of irregular heart rhythms. Chelation reduces or relaxes excessive heart contraction. It reduces heart irritability and increases potassium within the cells of your body.
Chelation removes lead and cadmium and other heavy metals from the body.
It removes calcium from arteriosclerotic plaque. It dissolves kidney stones, reduces serum iron and protects against iron poisoning and iron storage disease of the liver.
Chelation reduces heart valve calcification, improves heart function and detoxifies several snake and spider venoms. It reduces dark pigmentation associated with varicose veins.
It heals calcified necrotic ulcers. It can improve the vision in diabetic retinopathy. It dissolves small cataracts. It makes arterial walls more flexible.
It helps to prevent and reduce osteoarthritis. It reduces and alleviates the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. Chelation helps to smooth skin wrinkles, lowers insulin requirements for diabetics. It even dissolves large and small clots or thrombii.
It can reduce or reverse the effect of a stroke, particularly after the stroke, but even as late as two years following a stroke. It can reduce the effects of scleroderma. It reduces the need for bypass surgical procedures. EDTA can greatly reduce the need for lower extremity amputations.
Grants and aid for research on EDTA chelation therapy have been given by:
The National Institutes of Health
The U.S. Public Health Service
The National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Disease
The University of California
The American Cancer Society
The Charles S. Hayden Foundation
The Oscar Meyer Foundation
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
The John H. Hartford Foundation Providence Hospital Research Department
The U.S. Public Health Department—Division of General Medical Sciences
The Mayo Clinic
The Mayo Foundation
A search through the medical literature of the past will turn up no less than 1,554 mentions of chelation therapy. Chelation therapy is not a new treatment—it is one of the best guarded secrets that is known for health improvement.
Chelation therapy will remove excessive levels of 13 minerals from your body—lead, mercury, nickel, cadmium, and aluminum—all toxic minerals. It also will remove some good minerals from your body as well—such as chromium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, and calcium. It is important to take mineral supplements to counteract this while on chelation therapy.
What happens if you take chelation therapy for several months and your chest pain disappears, you’re able to walk up a mountain, you feel wonderful and have thrown your nitroglycerine tablets away, and as far as you’re concerned, you’re cured? What will happen to you? If you do nothing after chelation therapy, surely and slowly your disease process will return upon you.
Chelation therapy is not a cure. It backs out disease very well, opens blocked blood vessels, and restores circulation, but it is not a cure. If you do not pay attention to diet, if you don’t stop smoking, if you don’t take the proper nutritional supplements, if you don’t exercise regularly, if you don’t make those very important basic changes which control the disease, then surely the disease process will settle back in upon you at some point in the future.
It is believed that in addition to following good diet and exercise, taking supplements, and not smoking, you should be taking additional maintenance doses of EDTA on a continual basis.
EDTA Oral Chelation
Four Reasons to Consider It
EDTA Oral Chelation has a rejuvenating effect on the body, slowing down the biological clock of aging because of its powerful anti-oxidant, free-radical scavenging ability. EDTA is a weak, synthetic amino acid related to vinegar that was developed by the Germans in 1931 as a solution for heavy-metal poisoning (due to the ingestion of lead, mercury, aluminum, cadmium, etc.). It also has been found to have a wide range of positive results in many other health conditions.
1. Cardiovascular disease is today’s number one killer. EDTA can be the solution to many people’s health problems, because it cleans out the cardiovascular system not only of heavy metals, but also of the plaque and calcium that restricts and impedes the flow of blood and oxygen to the organs and extremities. In an 18-year study, Dr. Walter Blumer of Switzerland used EDTA to reduce the incidence of heart disease and cancer in his patients by 80 percent.
2. EDTA offers a solution for reversing osteoporosis or bone loss. Through a complex action of the parathyroid gland, EDTA actually stimulates bone growth. Thus, while it’s removing calcium from plaque in blood vessels, EDTA has the ability to make bones stronger and denser. Women have reported the reversal of bone loss in as little as two months using EDTA Oral Chelation.
3. Persons having diabetes can benefit from EDTA Oral Chelation. It has produced great results in diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, cataracts, floaters, and preventing diabetic gangrene by restoring blood flow and circulation to the body extremities and appendages.
4. If you or someone you know is on any kind of blood thinner, be aware that people can get off these drugs with the use of EDTA Oral Chelation. A 31-page supplement published in the British medical journal Lancet in November 1996 pointed out that common anti-clotting drugs such as aspirin and coumadin are effective against only one-third of the cases of excessive platelet aggregation and coagulation. None of them gets at the whole problem. EDTA, on the other hand, appears to work against all clotting mechanisms, acting as a preventative in keeping the blood sufficiently thin so that one does not fall victim to heart attack and stroke.
Excerpts from Chelation Can Cure
By Dr. E.W. McDonagh
Ethylene Diamine Tetra-acetic Acid (EDTA) is a non-toxic amino acid that was synthesized in Germany in 1931. It was designed to treat patients who were severely lead-poisoned. Prior to its development, little could be done for these unfortunate people. They died because of the tremendous toxic effect of lead on the brain, nervous system, and other major organs.
Chemists in the food processing industry are quite familiar with chelation chemistry and EDTA. The research literature contains more than 3,000 reference papers concerning EDTA. EDTA is used as a preservative in countless foodstuffs—canned, bottled, and dry-packed.
The chemistry of blood banking is another source of EDTA information. The substance is used in the performance of many blood tests. Small amounts of EDTA are added to banked blood to prevent blood cells from breaking down.
EDTA is known to be a calcium-blocking agent and a potent coronary vasodilator. In other words, EDTA can bind or chelate calcium, as well as other minerals in the body. It removes calcium particles deposited in arterial wall plaques and atheromas. In addition, EDTA blocks the slow calcium currents in the arterial wall, resulting in arterial vasodilation.
Probably the major underlying condition leading to cardiovascular disease is atherosclerosis, also known as hardening of the arteries. In time, this degenerative disease can narrow or block arteries in the heart, brain, and other parts of the body. It may begin early in life. The linings of the arteries become thickened and roughened by deposits of fat, cholesterol, fibrin (a clotting material), cellular debris, and calcium.
As this buildup on the inner walls becomes hard and thick, arteries lose their ability to expand and contract. The blood moves with difficulty through the narrowed artery channels. This makes it easier for a clot to form that will block the channel (lumen) and deprive the heart, brain, and other organs of the necessary blood supply. In such a situation, how can dilator drugs possibly be effective?
When a complete blockage occurs in a vessel to the brain, the result may be a cerebral thrombosis, a form of stroke. Based on what is known, scientists acknowledge the relationship between the amount of cholesterol and saturated fats in the bloodstream, and coronary artery disease—a blockage of the arteries that supply blood to the heart muscle itself.
To review precisely what chelation is, consider the following: the electromagnetic attraction of fats and proteins for divalent calcium that has wandered through the injuries in blood vessel walls is the same process that enables EDTA to remove calcium and fat from the plaque that occludes the vessel. A study of over six hundred human aortas has demonstrated alterations in the elastic tissue with accumulations of calcium prior to the deposition of fat and cholesterol (Blumenthal, 1944).
Calcium & Chelation
Calcium has two positive charges which are called valences. Hence, calcium is divalent. Calcium is strongly attracted electromagnetically by the open-ended molecular structure of EDTA that is circulating in the blood during the chelation treatment. This results in the calcium ion being incorporated into the EDTA molecular structure, forming a closed ring. When this process takes place, the metal is said to be chelated, and EDTA is termed the chelating agent.
When calcium (or other divalent metals such as lead, mercury, cadmium, aluminum, etc.) is chelated by EDTA, the original electromagnetic attraction is lost, and the fatty debris is dissolved by circulating blood and metabolized. The calcium-EDTA molecule, now inactive and non-toxic, is carried by the blood until it passes through the kidneys. It then is removed from the body via the urine.
The solid sticky plaque goes into solution and is harmlessly removed. By this unique mechanism, dangerous solids are converted to a liquid, then transported away to be eliminated. This is a natural, normal phenomenon of body chemistry.
Norman E. Clarke, Sr., MD, a cardiologist at Providence Hospital in Detroit, was the first American to discover the many beneficial effects of EDTA chelation. When he treated battery factory workers for lead poisoning, they reported relief of their symptoms of chest pain (angina), arthritis, intermittent claudication (severe leg pain due to plugged arteries in the legs), as well as their symptoms of lead poisoning.
Dr. Clarke, now in his eighties and very active in practice and on the lecture circuit, is recognized as a chelation pioneer in the Soviet Union. The Russians use chelation therapy as the second most common treatment for arteriosclerotic artery disease. It is also the preferred method of treatment in Czechoslovakia. EDTA chelation is administered with great success for blood vessel disease, stroke, senility, diabetes, kidney diseases, and other degenerative diseases in Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, and Canada, to name just a few countries.
EDTA Chelation Therapy and High Blood Pressure
People with greatly elevated blood pressure commonly have symptoms of dizziness, shortness of breath, headache, and blurred vision. In mild to moderate blood pressure elevation, there may be no symptoms. The diastolic or resting heart pressure is the second number of the blood pressure reading. In younger patients with diastolic pressures of 110 millimeters of mercury or higher, headaches in the morning are common.
Breathlessness produced by easy effort, such as slow walking, is common. The patient may notice pulsation of neck veins, which may also be swollen and distended. A clicking or roaring or ringing in the ears is a frequent finding.
High blood pressure patients commonly complain of frequent need to urinate after they have gone to bed for the night, even though kidney function may be normal. Hypertension commonly occurs as the result of local ischemia (loss of oxygen carried by the blood) which has resulted from atheromatous narrowing (occlusion) of an artery in the brain, heart, or lower limbs.
As the pressure continues its abnormal rise, death or damage to the heart, brain, or kidneys is likely. The heart will enlarge, kidneys begin to fail, and uremia is present. Stroke is common.
These patients commonly range in age from forty to seventy. Their blood pressure is above 110 millimeters mercury diastolic. Systolic pressures (the first number of the blood pressure reading) range from 130 to 170 or more. In a 35-year-old man with a normal blood pressure of 120/80, the risk of death over the next twenty years would double if his pressure were 142/90. That risk increases 2.2 times at 142/95. At 152/95, the twenty year mortality risk is 2.5 times. LDL cholesterol is directly and independently associated with cardiovascular risks. HDL cholesterol, on the other hand, appears to offer protection.
Aerobic exercise, liver function, and supplementation with digestive enzymes and selected amino acids can enable the patient to favorably adjust the HDL/LDL ratio, and hence reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.
In addition to selenium deficiencies, these patients usually have reduced magnesium and potassium. Protein and microscopic bleeding are commonly found in the urine. Damage to the retinal membranes of the eye results from leaking arterioles. Flame hemorrhages, cotton wool exudates atrioventricular nicking, and scaling of the arterioles can be seen on examination. As blood pressure rises, the arterioles constrict and eventually give way to the pressure. Leakage occurs and this seeing membrane (retina) swells. Visual loss results.
Similar damage occurs in the brain. Patients with abnormally high blood pressure and increasingly severe headaches can progress eventually to impairment of brain function and stupor. The brain swells as plasma leaks out from the arterioles. Abrupt onset of neurological signs such as numbness, nausea, vomiting, loss of muscle function in the face, arm, or leg, followed by unconsciousness signifies the onset of bleeding inside the skull. This is a stroke. EDTA produces remarkably beneficial effects in the human body. Every cell benefits. Results are seen first in the blood vessels, notably the arteries.
Abnormal calcium is removed, and the occluded (plugged-up) vessels are reopened. This effect is produced only upon metastatic calcium (calcium found in areas where it should not be), and not upon normal tissue calcium, as shown consistently by the lack of development of osteoporosis or of increased dental caries. Increased X-ray bone density is observed in cases of osteoporosis after they have been treated with EDTA.
This process may go on for months and explain the frequently described phenomena of continued clinical improvement after chelation has ceased, such as improved joint function, because arthritic joint deposits are decreased.
Some critics have complained that treatment with EDTA is not “permanent.” These uninformed experts would know, if they had any experience with the treatment, that the results are probably more permanent than any other vascular treatment utilized in this country today. Once the occluding slag and sludge is removed from the inside walls of the arteries, they can carry blood efficiently once more and elasticity returns. In other words, ischemic atherosclerosis is reversed.
Tissues, organs, and cells downstream of the formerly plugged artery can now obtain the nutrients and oxygen that were once denied. These cells which were once dormant, or partially dormant, can now revive and carry on their normal metabolic chemistry. Toxins and waste products that have not been properly removed due to inadequate circulation are eliminated as the perfusion normalizes.
EDTA chelation treatment can help patients with very advanced chronic diseases and in the majority of cases bring the patient back to normal functioning. The treatment can clean up the blood vessels and organs of even the most severely ill patients, and many times the patient can then be successfully treated with the usual conventional treatments. Another common medical practice in this country is that of treating patients only when they exhibit symptoms of chronic illness. The rule seems to be, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” which is fine, as long as it’s someone else’s health that needs to be “broken.” How much better would it be if we could spend more resources and attention on keeping people well, rather than concentrating on trying to make people better after they are sick. We should concentrate on health improvement and maintenance.
Treatment with EDTA has many advantages that conventional medicine can never offer. This treatment can:
Treat several areas of illness in the body at the same time.
Be combined with drug, antibiotic, or other therapy to treat the disease conditions. The patient makes a faster response and can then be weaned from drug therapy. Chelation and supplementation can complete the recovery.
Eliminate the need for hospitalization for most chronically ill patients.
Greatly reduce the costs to patients for drugs.
Keep wellness (health) intact longer, once it has been attained.
Greatly increase the effectiveness in the treatment of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, gangrene, retinitis, macular degeneration, kidney disease, and many other difficult medical conditions.
About Oral Sublingual EDTA
Unlike intravenous chelation therapy, NaturoDoc’s EDTA Sublingual Powder is taken by mouth. A small one-ounce scoop comes inside each bottle, and twice a day, morning and night, you place a scoop of our sublingual EDTA underneath your tongue and hold it there for a few minutes without swallowing to let it be absorbed through the mucous membranes of the mouth. We recommend you just keep your bottle of EDTA next to your toothbrush. A bottle lasts about a month at this rate, after which you should stop and reevaluate before possibly continuing for another month.
How does EDTA taste? Quite tolerable, actually; it’s somewhere between salty and sweet.
Oral EDTA should be taken away from meals so that its action does not remove the beneficial nutrients in your food. You should also supplement your diet with B vitamins and minerals while taking EDTA.
The body absorbs about 50 percent of the oral EDTA, and this sublingual (under the tongue) administration is much quicker, easier, and cheaper than intravenous (IV) administration. While the IV method does get 100 percent of the EDTA into your bloodstream, it is much more costly, time-consuming, and requires a medical technician and thus an office visit.
NaturoDoc’s oral EDTA powder is the most cost-effective, convenient way we have found to make the vast benefits of chelation therapy available to all.
The $35 Billion Boondoggle: Over 80% of Recommended bypasses and angiograms are unnecessary
Reviewed by Irene Alleger
At a time when health care costs are threatening to bankrupt the nation, too little attention has been paid to procedures and treatments that have failed to show benefits, and not surprisingly, are some of the costliest medical interventions around. There is so much talk about unproven treatments and quackery aimed at the alternative medical practices that few people ever stop to question or investigate the efficacy, or even safety, of high-tech medical procedures.
Even research that shows that over 80% of bypasses and angiograms being recommended are not necessary has failed to change the lucrative methodology of cardiologists. Since heart disease accounts for a major portion of our health care dollars, it is a perfect example of how vested interests manipulate the public and bury any criticism of the methodology in the name of profit.
In Heart Frauds, Dr. Charles McGee documents the statistics, studies, and hidden failures surrounding the treatment of heart disease, particularly angiograms and bypass surgery. Although one-third of the population now prefers some alternative medical care, when it comes to heart attacks, the scare tactics used to sell these procedures are almost foolproof. Doctors tell the frightened heart attack patients they have a “widow maker,” referring to a blocked artery, or that they are living with a “time bomb.” Coronary bypass surgery and angioplasty are said to be absolutely necessary to get them through the next few days alive. Few people in this situation,
(usually drugged, as well) can mount an intelligent argument against these “specialists.”
If alternatives are discussed at all, such as the recent publicized results of diet and lifestyle changes, they are shrugged off by the cardiologist as too time-consuming, difficult to comply with, and haven’t really been proven to work. Specialists, particularly, have made medicine into business, and in business, as any American can tell you, it’s only the bottom line that counts.
Dr. McGee uses satire and humor in his presentation of an appallingly unethical use of balloon angioplasty as “the invasive cardiologist’s claim to a lifestyle of the rich and famous.” Ironically, the bypass surgeons saw the cardiologists using angioplasty as enemies initially (to their bank account), but soon learned that there was a big enough pie for all to share. As more angioplasties were performed, the number of Coronary Artery Bypass Grafts (CABG), referred to routinely and affectionately as cabbage, also increased.
Surgical Procedures
“Surgical procedures on the heart resembled a bottomless pit. If more physicians begin to divide up a medical pie, doctors can increase the size of the pie simply by recommending more procedures.” In 1990 cardiologists performed about 285,000 balloon angioplasties, and cardiac surgeons cracked 380,000 chests. “It is not unusual to see patients who have had 3 or 4 balloon procedures followed by a ‘cabbage,’ all within 4 or 5 months, and all failing to help.”
Dr. McGee cites the studies done on these procedures in detail, and it is clear that the public has been kept ion the dark. In three major controlled studies, bypass surgery was shown not to extend survival rates past 11 years, and that “early surgery is unlikely to increase the prospect of survival.”
In an editorial that accompanied one study, Eugene Braunwald, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, pointed out that an increasing number of patients were being operated upon, not because of the presence of intractable angina, but because of the hope, “largely without objective supporting evidence at present, that coronary bypass surgery prolongs life.”
He further stated that “this rapidly growing enterprise is developing a momentum and constituency of its own, and as time passes, it will be progressively more difficult and costly to curtail it materially….” He wrote, “I believe that this operation should and increasingly will be restricted to patients in whom intensive medical therapy has failed, or in whom improved survival after surgery has been unambiguously demonstrated, rather than as a panacea for coronary artery disease.” These remarks were made in 1977 and his fears that this “enterprise” would become more difficult to curtail were fully realized in the decade following.
Although angiography and bypass surgery are the most high-profile and costly abuses in the treatment of heart disease, Dr. McGee shoots down the cholesterol theory, too, as another failed approach to treating heart disease. The pharmaceutical drugs to “treat” high cholesterol have not only failed to show efficacy, but are known to be dangerous as well. Perhaps the worse consequence of these hyped treatments is that patients do not get better, as they might on the diet and lifestyle change programs. The first half of Heart Frauds is a careful examination of the rationale and results of this “standard of care,” and Dr. McGee has no problem documenting the failure of these treatments to benefit heart patients.
Although it may take some time to dislodge the “enterprise,” in the second half of the book, ample evidence is given of the alternative, non-invasive (and inexpensive) treatments that have shown efficacy in the treatment of heart disease. The diet and nutritional approach to treating coronary artery disease is documented by many recent studies, especially Dr. Dean Ornish’s program, and Dr. McGee brings them all together, showing the consistent success of this approach.
Diet
Interesting studies are cited showing the long-term effects of the introduction of refined carbohydrates into our diet; for instance, EDTA chelation therapy is given top billing as well for its documented ability to reverse artery disease. An important aspect of these approaches is that they prove that coronary heart disease can be reversed, and that the body will heal itself if we will do just two things: remove the things that make us sick, and augment the things our bodies are lacking.
Nutrients are examined in detail, citing studies that show the anti-oxidants, in particular, to be greatly preventive of heart disease, and some of the more widely studies nutrients associated with heart disease. Other risk factors, such as lack of exercise and chlorinated water, are explored as well.
Dr. McGee speculates that the cholesterol theory is so well established now (as part of the “enterprise”) that it will take time for the oxidative theory of the development of atherosclerosis to replace it, despite the plethora of new studies on anti-oxidants. However, as you may have noticed, change is the watchword of the day; old institutions and old ideas are changing rapidly at the end of this century, and especially in the area of nutrition and lifestyle.
Heart Frauds is a well-documented expose’ of the waste of approximately $35 billion a year in the standard treatment of heart disease, wasted because these approaches to treating heart disease are not shown to be beneficial, yet take a huge chunk out of the healthcare dollars. Dr. McGee acknowledges that the basic problem is politics and commercial interests—putting profit ahead of the welfare of the patient. Becoming informed, with the help of books like this one, is the first step toward changing the standard of care, both for patients and doctors alike.
Reprint, Townsend Letter for Doctors, April, 1994.