My brother asked me what tests I recommend and that got me thinking that I’m starting to feel confident about a few recommendations for anyone not getting real help from their MD. In addition to my own saga, I’ve been trying to help my wife and youngest daughter with their health issues and through this process, I’ve seen a lot. So here’s my list.
First, I’m assuming you’ve tried a lot of obvious things like food elimination diets – cutting out sugar, fruit, high carb foods, gluten and dairy. But I’ll go a little further and say that I’m really interested in finding the root causes of illness. So for example, I feel much better eating only whole foods – primarily meats and veggies with no sugar, fruit and very low carb (a semi-ketogenic diet). But that’s not what I consider a root cause or real solution. A good starting point, but not enough for me and millions of others.
I believe the primary reason chronic illness rates are skyrocketing today is exposure to toxins, blue light, pathogens and stress combined with lack of exposure to sunshine, physical activity and relaxation. These root causes will cascade dozens or hundreds of symptoms on you leading you and your MD to assign lots of relatively unhelpful diagnoses: fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, adrenal fatigue, hypothyroidism, sleep apnea, anxiety disorder etc etc. The risk for you is that you hang your hat on one of these diagnoses and stop looking for the root cause.
If your MD says “Of course you have fatigue, you have hypothyroidism.” that’s not good enough. You want to ask why you have it!
Another critical risk is that your MD orders tests and trials that make you much sicker, or that you poison yourself by taking the wrong supplements. Both of these tragedies happened to me.
Keeping in mind the root causes of illness, here is a list of lab work you might consider to help you and your MD untangle whatever mess you have found yourself in. If you can afford them, or your insurance is covering them, I like these tests because the issues they affect very significant populations if not everyone alive, in order:
Vitamin D
Get a vitamin D test, specifically for 25(OH)D – usually covered by insurance 4x a year – read vitamin D and sunlight deprivation for importance. Note, Dr. Jack Kruse will say vitamin D supplementation is not sufficient, that if you want to be really healthy, you’ll need to get outside in the sunshine and live in a latitude that corresponds to your skin type – which means if you’re dark skinned and live in Boston or Seattle, you’ll need to move South, maybe to San Diego, Atlanta or Jacksonville! And then there is Morley Robbins who says vitamin D supplementation is dangerous because of its cascade effect on your biochemistry especially vitamin A, copper and ceruloplasmin levels.
Lyme Disease
Get the Western blot Lyme disease test and try to find someone to do dark-field microscopy analysis of your blood. There are those who say the Borrelia bacteria which causes Lyme disease is almost universal today, meaning everyone is infected. Certainly everyone in my family is. I know because I have a microscope and can see the bacteria very easily. Of two healthy friends I tested, one was infected and the other not. It’s a dangerous bug to carry, in my opinion, whether you are symptomatic or not. It feeds on manganese and possibly iron which over the long term will destabilize your mineral balance causing a cascade of other problems. Furthermore, if you are asymptomatic, your Borrelia is lying in wait for some other physiological insult, like an exposure to mercury, to weaken you sufficiently to where it can begin wreaking havoc in your body.
Hair Mineral Analysis Testing
A hair tissue mineral analysis (htma) test will reveal mineral deficiencies and heavy metal toxicities. Have it reviewed by a Nutritional Balancing Science expert because there are many hidden subtleties to interpreting hair tests. You’ll get a picture of your body chemistry describing your metabolic rate, adrenal and thyroid function, nervous system imbalances, protein synthesis health, inflammation, energy levels, mental health, liver and kidney health, and carbohydrate/sugar control tolerance. But most importantly, you’ll get a path forward to correcting problems. Here’s why I’m so confident in hair testing –
When I was so ill that I could not walk more than a couple blocks without resting, there was no MD who could say what was wrong with me and there was no blood test that didn’t pronounce me healthy. But if you look at my hair tests from four years ago, you (or a nutritional balancing practitioner) would know instantly that I was in extreme burnout or the death pattern. That’s quite remarkable if you think about it. It’s predictive!
Urine Toxic Metals Challenge Test
Our bodies sequester toxic metals in places like the brain and liver where it may consider they’ll do the least harm. As a consequence, lab work becomes difficult. Even hair mineral analysis testing which is extraordinarily accurate won’t always reveal your toxicities. That’s because the sometimes the toxins are not circulating in your body and not being excreted – they’re in storage.
That doesn’t mean they are not harming you – neither the brain nor the liver work well when they are stewing in lead, mercury and copper as mine are.
But there is one lab test which will reveal your toxicities. It’s called a provocation test or provoked urine test. It’s really simple – you take a chemical chelator like DMSA which is a chemical that has a high affinity for and binds heavy metals. So it circulates in your body (though it doesn’t cross the blood brain barrier) grabbing metals where it finds them, and then it gets excreted in your urine along with the heavy metals it captured.
Your test results will analyze the quantity and variety of metals in your urine giving you an idea of your toxicity levels. My urine challenge test results were not as impressive as my hair test results but they did show a consistent pattern that led me to believe lead and mercury toxicity played a key role in my suffering. Later I learned that lead increases the toxicity of mercury 18 fold.
You’ll find all kinds of dirtbags calling this quack medicine, including people who claim to be MDs. All I can tell you is, these skeptics are not people who have experienced heavy metal toxicity and chelation. I can only speculate that they are there funded by the dental amalgam companies who will be forced to pay billions of dollars in damages one day when the truth eventually gets out. Who else would belittle basic science?
Think about the pro-tobacco machine of 25 years ago.
Food Sensitivities
Get an ALCAT food sensitivity test. This looks at how one’s immune cells respond to a vast array of foods or other substances under conditions designed to mimic what happens in real life. Immune cells, when activated, produce both free radicals and inflammatory substances that can cause tissue damage and premature aging.
I include this here because many people with chronic illness develop odd and very restrictive diets because of unpleasant reactions to food which might include fatigue, belching, bloating, stomach pain and other issues. This happened to both me and my daughter at different times.
Here’s how this test helped my daughter. She was having lots of digestive problems so we tried various elimination diets which was an enormous amount of work in very difficult for everyone involved. She was eating maybe seven foods only and we knew she needed more variety. The ALCAT results corresponded very nicely with some foods that she knew created a big problem for her. But there were a couple foods on her list of seven in the moderate reaction category. These are food she was eating in great quantity. So this test helped her avoid overeating foods that were triggering her immune response and it allowed us to add a much greater variety of safe foods. This didn’t solve her health problems because she has Lyme Disease but it’s a step forward. And that’s how you win a war, one battle at a time. You need small wins.
Pathogens
Get a stool test from Genova which includes parasitology but keep in mind that parasitology testing is notoriously unreliable. You may be better off doing a parasite cleanse instead. Note that a number of pathogens are blood-borne or can be detected through antibody testing. My own blood work revealed Strongyloides antibodies.
Sleep study
This may be the only thing I never blogged about! My MD sent me for a sleep study and it was an absolute nightmare. When I researched it in Google I found it’s quite a scam. You pay something like $750 or more to go sleep in a hospital bed with a dozen or more wires attached to your scalp. The sleep center didn’t take any basic care to accommodate people with difficulty sleeping. The bed was not comfortable and the room wasn’t dark nor quiet. Imagine that – an uncomfortable bed in a room with blinking lights from machines, light coming under the door along with the conversation of nurses just outside the room. The only way I could get a very brief sleep was by taking a benzodiazepine.
They found I had positional sleep apnea, but because I had not slept well called the results inconclusive and invited me to come back again, to pay another $750 for another night of hell. I didn’t to it. Instead I bought my own oximeter that would record my sleep history and allow me to download it to my PC.
That was years ago and now you can purchase an attachment for your iPhone which accomplishes the same thing for $40.
I did end up sleeping with a BiPAP machine for several years which is quite a nuisance. Finally I decided to teach myself to sleep on my side which mostly eliminated my apneas.
Everyone knows or can sense that our bodies heal during sleep, that’s why I consider the home sleep study so important. Anything you can do to improve your sleep is a precious step in the right direction. Sleep apnea alone can destroy your life as can anything else that ruins your sleep!
Standard bloodwork
If you have no idea at all what’s wrong and haven’t done any testing in the past, you couldn’t go wrong by getting all of these tests (the numbers are lab corp ids) assuming your insurance company is paying the bill (as mine does). If you think given the number of possible tests that the idea of listing these is foolish, you might be right. On the other hand, I’m trying to list tests that I think may be overlooked by most practitioners – the ones that aren’t necessarily obvious:
viral load (my results on the right)
- Human Herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6) Antibodies, IgG – 161075
- Cytomegalovirus (CMV) Antibodies, IgG – 006494
- Parvovirus B19 (Human), IgG, IgM – 163303
- Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) Acute Infection Antibodies Profile – 216655
parasitic infection
- Strongyloides, IgG Antibody, Qualitative, EIA – Test Number: 164000
thyroid – read about Hashimoto’s thyroiditis
- TSH And free T4 – 224576
Free T3 – 010389
Reverse T3 – 070104
TPO antibodies – 006676
CMP – 322000
CBC With differential – 005009
Hepatic function panel – 322755
vitamin D, copper & iron – read this for interpretation by Morley Robbins
- 25 (OH)D (calcidiol) – 081950
1,25 (OH)2 D3 (calcitriol) – 790540
mag rbc – 001537
plasma zinc – 001800
serum copper – 001560
serum ceruloplasm – 001560
ferretin – 004598
iron & TIBC – 001321
sugar control etc
- a1c – 001453
- RBC Mn – 790540
Nutritional analysis
Let’s look at my daughter’s NutrEval – this gave me the confidence to give her significantly more methylation support and allowed me to add a few other supplements based on some key deficiencies.
I knew from her 23andme genetic analysis which you will read about further down the page, that she has many of my methylation SNPs, but it was nice to have confirmation from a second source. I’ve heard many doctors say that studying genetics rarely lead to improvements in their patients health and that genetics show a snapshot in time because genes can flip on and off in response to environmental influences. Getting the nutritional analysis done is a way to avoid putting too much weight on genetic flaws.
And, it motivates me to do further testing to explore her high copper result. It also makes me wonder if I had done a NutrEval myself at age 13, perhaps mine would’ve looked somewhat similar. A picture of someone on a teeter totter. Healthy enough for now but…
Click the thumbnails to read:
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Genetics
Get your genetics from 23andme and then use livewello for analysis. For my money, the methylation profile is where the action is – it drives your detox system and if that’s dragging, you’re headed for trouble. Look at your PEMT genes and your diet. Studies have recently shown that because of common genetic polymorphisms (see mine), choline deficiency is a widespread problem. Men, postmenopausal women, and premenopausal women with PEMT SNPs need to increase choline intake in the diet to offset elevated risk of liver dysfunction. Translation: you can develop fatty liver in 3 weeks if your diet is deficient in choline and you have PEMT flaws.
Avoid Like the Plague
- Don’t read quackwatch and skeptic websites – these parasites prey on those of us suffering with chronic illness. They get an ego boost from throwing around uninformed opinions. They are uninformed about the complexities of your illness and the details of your peculiar situation. Even worse, they are uninformed about the therapies they call scams – you’ll see that no skeptic will ever do their own experiments, so they never have any firsthand knowledge or experience from which they could speak. Why not? Because they have nothing invested, no illness (except maybe for mental illness) and no consequence for being wrong. Because the skeptic has no investment and no consequence, he or she is unwilling to make any effort to discover the truth. You on the other hand have a lot at stake. If you blindly accept the skeptic’s word who says liver flushing is quackery, you may never recover from your toxicity and chronic fatigue or or immune dysfunction. The real world runs on effort, not the ego puffery of the skeptic.
- Avoid falling for the medical diagnosis your MD (or even your naturopath) wants to pin on you and never stop searching for root causes. Whether you’ve been told you have hypothyroidism, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, IBS, adrenal fatigue, rheumatoid arthritis etc, these are just collections of symptoms, not root causes. Examples of true root causes are emotional traumas, automobile or sporting accidents, toxic exposures, prolonged stress, sleep loss, poor or wrong diet, infections of all kinds and genetic flaws.
Have you already done what Dr Klingheardt recommends and gotten rid of ALL RF emitting devices in the home? (WiFi cordless phones and of course cell phone etc)? I saw you are still dealing with sleep issues and microwaves in the RF spectrum inhibit the pineal gland in releasing melatonin in the brain…Excuse me for not perusing ALL your posts, to see if you had done this, but when one woman said her 7 year old was getting migraines and you did not suggest her turning off WiFi etc, I figured there was a good chance you didn’t know about it’s profound effects on health and electromagnetic aspects of the body( neurology particularly). It causes the blood brain barrier to leak, calcium channels to open (worse than it sounds) general disruption in the electromagnetic fields but neurological issues tend to show up first (fatigue, lack of concentration, dizziness, inability to sleep, migraines/headaches …later cancers, inability to reproduce, spontaneous miscarriages etc.) I have a Youtube channel (YT DanaAshlie) and I have produced a very comprehensive presentation (WIRELESS WARFARE…) on this linked to studies as well as solutions to fix the home. It basically is the missing piece in the war against our thriving health (ever put aluminum in a microwave?) 🙂 anyway, Hope this helps! My email is danaashlie@yahoo.com if you’d like to correspond, probably won’t be back here, just looking for solutions for retrovirus stuff via klingheardt and heavy metal detox info etc.
Hi Dana, yes I’ve been working on EMF / RF mitigation for years and sleep in a makeshift faraday cage. Still have some more improvements I’m working on. Don’t think EMF is a primary issue for me though. My migraines are driven by gut infection so EMF isn’t my first thought on that…
Erik,
i also have multiple issues going on. I have had a basic methylation genetic test for COMT and MTHFR with mutations on both. I want to do a complete genetic test to better help me understand the complex issues I have. It seems that 23 and me only tests a few things. Are they capable of doing MAO, CBS and all the other methylation tests? Also my doctor sent me a Doctors Data mercury toxicity test. I am afraid to do it since the test requires 1900 mg of DMSA plus 3000mg of glycine all at the same time. I react to 250mg of glycine alone! I am very sensitive to almost all medications. I am going to get Dr. Cutler’s book and get the hair test instead especially since i have been reading all your extremely helpful information. I feel your pain.
Larry, you will get a complete set of data from 23andme that you can feed into analyzers such as livewello.com and you will get all the info you want. I would also be very wary of such a large quantity of DMSA. Keep reading. I would also read Dr. L Wilson. He is opposed to all chelators except in very dire circumstances..
Apparently Vitamin D is a hormone, we need sunlight to make it, I notice others using sun lamps in their cubicles. One alternative doctor I spoke with recently said autoimmune illness is near non-existent near the equator, this makes so much sense. Regular sleep cycles, year round fresh foods, who knows what else but maybe even growing practices are better.
I do so much better in the summer, took up gardening about 5 years back, but it’s time to descend into the hell of winter again. Yeah the medical system, pretty bad, they killed a family member via a botched colonoscopy this year, no time to say goodbye, just bled out in her sleep, they probably gave her pills to make her sleep, so yeah .. they killed her, iatrogenic disease #3 killer — then they took two months to admit it was their fault.
I look forward to picking around here some, I’ve done allot of leg work over the last few years trying to figure out what is up with my mystery illness.
Sorry to hear about your family member Calvin – that’s tragic!
You got me thinking about sun lamps and I did a lot of research. If you don’t mind having a mercury bulb in your house, it’s quite easy and inexpensive. I won’t bring mercury into my home, so I’m going to have to spend big bucks for these LEDs: http://www.bmlhorticulture.com/led-light-bar-solar-max-spectrum/
I think the lamps are a great solution for people like my wife who won’t get much sun even in the summer and me in the winter.
Eric! Heck yeah!! I want to yell out at you (in a good way) about avoiding the Vitamin D supplementation! Now I can’t say with complete certainty, but all my research and some of my experience up to this point has led me to this reversal too, to stop trying to up my D levels, and instead do the opposite! But it actually wasn’t through the guy you mentioned though I’m excited to look him up. I can’t figure out how the oral Vitamin D3 supplementation craze started, why 1000s of research studies have took place in about the last 10 years, how it seems both the medical mainstream, media, AND so much of the alternative medicine both came to embrace it so greatly. On the side of alternative medicine, there are many MD integrative doctors, nutritionists, scientists, researchers etc. that I have a lot of respect for and believe them to be genuine and sincerely empathetic people trying to help, but somehow may have gotten mislead along the way in researching the findings of D supplementation. Maybe that is naïve of me to think, or to disagree with the overwhelming consensus in the little researched I am compared to any of them, but the alternative views put forth by some, and the research that seems to be there compels me to believe the opposite. For example I think the Vitamin D Council’s and Dr Mercola (who I think is basing it on their target levels and other supposed Vitamin D experts) levels of 25hydroxy seem kind of ridiculous (at least on the basis of a natural level and not considering a therapeutic/pharmaceutical level) considering stuff like 2 tribes living a very natural lifestyle almost on the equator have average D levels that would be considered deficient (cited on the D Council’s website themselves), and that supposedly most everyone in the world is D deficient. Dr. in nutrition, Christopher Masterjohn on the Weston Price Foundation and Dr. Marshall of the Marshall Protocol offer differing views from the “everyone has gotta get their D levels up” mentality. And to think what if Big Pharma knew to promote D would lead to greater sickness in the long run? to treat with tons more medications?
Maybe in your research, you’ve realized that it seems to be well established and agreed upon within the medical community that Vitamin D has some immune enhancing properties, but is overall an immunosuppressant. At least partly it being a steroid is reason for this. And perhaps so many of the positive results of D3 supplementation, at least for some diseases or for a limited time, are the result of its immunosuppressant properties, which may have contributed to so much of the confusion and miscommunication if there is such. For instance, a study showed that in Multiple Sclerosis, Vitamin D supplementation or levels prevent the immune system, though primed and ready, from traveling to the CNS to do its attack.
Which brings me to another point, and God I hope you get this, unless you are already intensely aware of this idea already. Even within the medical mainstream (at least according to what I looked up on WebMD), there is a part acknowledgment that all the autoimmune diseases might have an underlying chronic infectious disease agents that iare causing the immune system to fight in the first place. And perhaps you haven’t been diagnosed with any autoimmune disease, and I don’t know where you are currently with your health and progress, and I know your story of having been exposed to a lot of heavy metals and mercury and having a weak liver and gene mutations that hurts your detoxification pathways, and I know you know you’ve had at least some types of parasites in you and have seen them, but most likely I’d say from all the research I’ve done, I’m thinking there is probably a great chance that you have some type of incognito chronic infection that is causing you perhaps at least as much problems and blocking your path to health as the metals are and the rest of it.
And perhaps this is Lyme and/or the associated co infections that might be much more greatly widespread than is let on by the CDC. Seeing a tick bite or rash or living in an endemic area is far from a prerequisite for having it, the standard tests are highly unreliable giving a great percentage of false negatives, mosquitoes, mites, fleas, spiders etc can carry it and possibly transmit it, and it also may be transmitted sexually as their is some research to support it. Lyme is highly connected with pyrrole disorder too and it seems the bacteria(s) may make some changes to your liver to create this and other things.
Perhaps you have already come upon this info a long time ago as it seems like its widespread in the internet community, but I just thought I’d share it, at least in hopes that you’d analyze it a little closer than maybe you did the first time around.
Your mentioning that your wife and daughter are having their own health issues, though of course that is common for everyone to have health issues, perhaps it’s not just genes or whatever else, but it might also be because of an underlying infectious agent that you have all shared. For example, sarcoidosis, another autoimmune disease seems contagious in that it seems to run in close associations of ppl. And maybe they are only having minor and, in reality, unrelated problems to what you experience, but do remember that Lyme, like its cousin Syphillis, is also known as the Great Pretender as there are tons and tons of unspecific symptoms that could be attributed to a whole host of diseases, and one person’s symptoms can be totally different from the next person’s, though they share some underlying chronic infections.
So with that said, it seems that one would not want to try to boost their 25hydroxy levels (the semi-active form of D that is measured) by taking oral supplements, and my experience, in purposeful sunbathing when they’re body is trying to fight infection. It seems that while sunbathing or consuming foods that have natural D3 in them may not be as bad, it seems like the synthetic oral D3 supplementation may override the body’s regulation ability moreso than the formerly mentioned. This is pure conjecture but maybe this is why oral D seemed to affect me first before sunbathing ever did. And with the lyme bacteria turning down your immune system on a genetic level (this is part how it thrives), it doesn’t seem like you’d want to suppress it in other ways like taking D or getting too much sunlight (I’d also think you have to consider your genetic ancestry and that you came from a latitude probably much farther north than your current location and bundled up, and maybe so there is a tendency for you to get too much D maybe during your summer months where you live, where this becomes past your body’s regulating capabilities (although this is probably a little too simplistic as you would also consider the diet of your ancestry and maybe they took in a lot of foods with high natural D and if you live in the city and if you are inside all day, etc., but this is just food for thought about the possibility of your body not being able to regulate a certain higher level of sunshine in D production, despite the conventional idea that there is no problem.)
I’ve probably read 100s of pages about Borrelia Borderferi (Lyme) and the other infections. But I wanted to point this article out to you, and I haven’t even read it all yet, but from what I see I think this is a great and important place to start.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/08/04/dr-klinghardts-treatment-of-lyme-disease.aspx
Also, here is Dr. Marshall, I believe he is a doctor in biochemical engineering, so not an MD, but supposedly he has healed many ppl with various autoimmune diseases (including his own sarcoidosis) with his protocol, which I don’t necessarily agree with but involves avoiding all D in all its forms like the plague, taking a drug that turns on the immune system much more greatly epigenetically I guess you’d say, and then taking many rounds of antibiotics for an extended time. But note his slides of how Borrelia Bordefori (sp?) and the Epstein Barr virus (mono) turn down the immune system genetically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2yEwnZy8B8
Well and if none of this helps or is new to you, I just want to take this opportunity to say that you’re an inspiration in the horrendous struggles you have faced for so long and how you have tried to help people along the way (and definitely have with I’m sure tons of ppl; you’ve definitely helped me and contributed to my knowledge), and all this suffering will be redeemed one day. If any of this does enlighten or prove to be fruitful, i’ll be glad to answer any questions you have or thoughts and my experience and reading thus far about how to treat it.
Thanks for your kind words Joshua! I do wish I understood the vitamin D mystery better. It’s probably safe to assume that like many other supplements, it may Help many people at least initially while it harms others. There are so many cases like that where experts warned about the dangers of XYZ but XYZ has saved many lives. That’s the problem with our extreme individuality. A good case in point is IV chelation therapy. It is life transforming for many and severely debilitating to others. We gamble with everything we take. There is a good chance I do have Lyme but I’d consider it opportunistic and not a primary cause of my health issues as I know my gut infection seems to rule all the others. Now I’m starting to understand how it happened. High iron, low bioavailable copper, high b12 / folate supplementation and cortisol supplementation are all risk factors… the next few months should be very very interesting! Stay tuned 🙂
Eric – good info here – I would love to talk to you and compare notes. My blog post of my studies http://patrickrambling-pb.blogspot.com/2012/01/curriculum-vitae.html
hey Patrick, let’s talk, send me your phone number in a comment along with some good times to call you. Of course I won’t publish your comment!
Eric – thanks so much for posting this…really gives insight as to what the different tests are for.