Chelation Safety

The most common question I get asked is whether it is safe. Typically, a patient asks their family Doctor whether it is safe and he says absolutely not. It will kill your kidneys. Unfortunately your Physician is not only misguided but also out of date. In the 1950s when this drug first started being used in vascular disease, people were searching for the safest effective dose which in pharmaceutical terms is 50 mg/Kg or 23 mg/lb of lean body mass or approximately a 3000 mg (3 grams) dose infused over 3 hrs. Unfortunately some Doctor, figuring if a little is good then more would be better, gave a patient 9 grams (3 times more than we use) and infused it in 30 minutes (6 times faster than we do) hence giving it 18 times faster. The kidneys could not handle such a rapid detoxification and there were several deaths from renal failure. The problem is that your family Doctor is not aware of this and were he to give you 18 times more Digitalis than is safe, he would stop your heart and you would have the same end result that those patients in the 1950s experienced, namely death. This could be true of many drugs given in close to a 20 fold overdose.

When one questions the FDA, they admit that toxicity is not an issue with EDTA but this was not enough for the Doctors at the clinic. They, in the sake of good medical practice, do blood tests every 10 treatments with a comprehensive testing after 30 bottles. What they were doing was collecting a massive amount of scientific data because all of the blood work was done by Labcorp, one of the two largest labs in the country, and an independent entity not associated with the clinic. In the early 1980s the Doctors looked at creatinine and BUN (Blood Urea Nitrogen) levels (the two most generally accepted kidney function tests) in 383 patients that had completed 30 treatments with EDTA and found not only that the patients were not dying of kidney failure but that the kidneys got 15% better after the treatments (paper #6 and #18). This improvement might be explained in many ways including lowering blood pressure (paper #17), removing heavy metals (Cadmium and Lead both contribute to hypertension) or even improvement in blood flow in the renal artery (the artery to the kidney) which was documented by the pioneering doctors at the Clinic (paper #32).

In summary, I know a person has almost blind faith in their Doctors but this is the age of communication and most patients, via the internet, are as informed as their Doctors about many subjects yet we still have this built in prejudice against a treatment that really helps patients.