Author: Erik Fraunberger
Every time you drink or eat, you are poisoning yourself. At least that is what some would have you believe. A famous TV doctor once made the claim that giving apple juice to your children was the equivalent of feeding them poison due to supposedly high levels of arsenic. Leaving aside the vast number of people who have tasted apple juice and lived to tell the tale, it is true that our environment contains different metals, such as arsenic, mercury, and lead, that can be toxic to our bodies. Physicians can make use of powerful chemical magnets, known as chelators, to remove these harmful substances. However, there are some who believe certain diseases not traditionally associated with a buildup of metals in your body may be treated or cured with chelation therapy. Is there any scientific validity to this idea? In this article I will walk you through the role of metals in the body, the science behind chelation therapy, and if the use of chelation therapy outside of metal poisoning is supported by current evidence.
What are Metals?
Found in our water, food, and the air we breathe, essential metals such as zinc and iron, are used by our body to help produce energy, facilitate chemical reactions, and allow for our brain to function normally. While these essential metals keep us alive, being exposed to large amounts can also be bad for our health. Similarly, some metals found in the environment can be toxic for our health in very small doses. Excessive amounts of essential metals or small amounts of poisonous metals typically harm our body through chemically interacting with the fat, protein, and DNA inside of our cells, breaking them apart or interfering with their normal function.
What is Chelation Therapy?
If you accumulate too much metal in your body, doctors may administer a drug known as a chelator. As a powerful chemical magnet, chelators bind to any metal particles they find inside your body. Once the metal particles are captured by the chelator, your kidneys filter most of the combination into your urine to be excreted.
Chelation Therapy: All that glitters isn’t gold
In cases where a toxic level of any metal has been found, usually in urine or blood, using chelation therapy is scientifically valid. However, there are a growing number of individuals seeking chelation therapy for diseases not usually seen as involving exposure to metals. For example, many practitioners of alternative medicine promote the use of a chelator to treat heart disease. Interestingly, a large-scale clinical study [1] found chelation therapy reduced the number of negative cardiovascular events in patients with heart disease – but only if they had diabetes. Since our explanations of how heart disease and diabetes develop do not usually involve metals, it is tempting to conclude that chelation therapy may have some uses outside of treating metal poisoning. However, given the risks associated with using chelation therapy unnecessarily, more study is needed.
What harm could it do?
As powerful chemical magnets, unnecessary use of chelators can take away nutrients that are important for our overall health such as calcium and zinc. This is very dangerous as these elements are vital for your heart to beat correctly and brain cells to fire properly, among other things. Unfortunately, practitioners of alternative medicine persist in using chelation therapy as a diagnostic tool and treatment in people who do not present with symptoms of metal toxicity. For example, even though somebody may not have any symptoms of metal toxicity, chelators are given to drag metals out of the blood and cells [2]. The science tells us this is a bad idea for several reasons:
1) It has the strong possibility of providing a false and biased result. Comparing a urine/fecal matter test before and after administering powerful chemical magnets will obviously display differences in levels of various metals.
2) Since there are no specific symptoms to indicate metal poisoning, chelators will mostly bind to essential minerals such as calcium and cause severe illness that may result in organ failure and death [3].
3) There is no rigorous scientific evidence to indicate that chelation therapy is useful in treating or curing any disease not involving excessive amounts of metal such as autism or atherosclerosis [4,5].
Where do we go from here?
Is chelation therapy a cure-all? Absolutely not. Can it be used to treat illnesses aside from metal toxicity? Our current understanding of the mechanism of chelation tells us no. However, in the case of heart disease, the evidence is inconclusive; we don’t know. However, using large, well-designed experiments such as the new TACT2 (Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy 2) trial funded by the National Institutes of Health [6], we can work toward finding an answer to discover a new role for or mechanism of chelation therapy and prevent its inappropriate use.
Additional Resources
3) https://www.medpagetoday.com/neurology/autism/1616
4) http://www.cochrane.org/CD010766/BEHAV_chelation-autism-spectrum-disorder-asd
5) http://www.cochrane.org/CD002785/PVD_chelation-therapy-for-atherosclerotic-cardiovascular-disease
6) https://nccih.nih.gov/health/chelation