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Dr. Garry Gordon Interview: The Health Benefits of EDTA Chelation Therapy
I’ve been involved in studying trace metals now for thirty-five years and our research reveals that we can always find aluminum, cadmium, mercury, and lead in the plaque that is part of Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, etc. So as we start to put all these pieces together, we see that all of these toxins have an effect on biochemical levels and that is always going to have a psychiatric equivalent as well as an energy equivalent. In this discussion I’ve focused on the energy equivalent—because, obviously, if your heart is beating strong and you can go climb up steps that is a useful thing. But your brain has also got to process information efficiently, and it is not doing that when the enzymes that are critical in the brain for neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenaline are knocked out and not operating efficiently.
Q: Why does EDTA remove important metals and minerals from the body, such as zinc, and why is it essential to take a multi-mineral while on an EDTA program?
Dr. Gordon: EDTA is not smart enough to be able to go in the body and say, oh I’m just going to take you out and I don’t take you out. So EDTA will cause as much as a hundredfold increase in the excretion of zinc. As doctors, we have felt that it is certainly necessary to replace that zinc, especially because so many people obtain only a marginal intake of zinc from their diet to begin with. So EDTA has always got the theoretical risk that you could become zinc or copper deficient. But what’s confusing about this is the following. The body has a lot of innate wisdom. If your body becomes mineral or metal deficient it seems that it is able to ramp up the efficiency with which it absorbs minerals like calcium and metals like zinc.
Some of the early doctors didn’t give their patients mineral supplements with chelation. Dr. Norman Clark at Providence Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, was really the first doctor to ever actually get involved in EDTA research and he published the first study on it, although he never bothered to give zinc to anybody. When he was ninety-one years of age, he bounced up on the lectern to address all the doctors when I invited him to speak. I had been kind of embarrassed because he was ninety-one and I thought that I was going to have to help this old guy get up on the thing because it was about a three foot jump, but he just jumped up there. So obviously he’d been taking his own chelation. And I was this young guy trying to convince him that I knew more about EDTA than him and he needs to be taking zinc. He never took zinc and he wouldn’t take a multiple.
He took the attitude that we get rid of a lot of old zinc and the body is then wise enough to bring in new zinc if you’re eating intelligently. But since the literature would make a doctor taking that attitude at great risk, and because of our own research with rat pups, we chose to always supplement with zinc and other minerals during chelation. Our studies showed that when we gave EDTA to a rat mother we could get malformations in the rat pups unless we gave zinc. So I have always advocated that we must replace zinc. But that’s not a very hard thing to do. I have been on oral chelation for over thirty years, and I have many patients who have been on it for over twenty-five years. Frankly, it is a very simple thing. In a sense, it’s almost like the old metals may have given up some of their electrons, or their usefulness, and the body is happy to see the new metals come in.
There was a time when people only went out and bought vitamins instead of vitamins with minerals. And there was a time that companies like Theragram-M with Squib cheated the public and sold them a product as magnesium supplements that on the label said epsom salts. Once you discover that epsom salts are actually magnesium sulfate you realize that it actually robs the body of magnesium. So it’s nice if you pay attention and get a really good product that somebody has paid attention to, and just because something says on the label that it has zinc, copper, or magnesium in it doesn’t mean they care about whether it really works in your body.
Q: What are some other effective chelators besides EDTA?
Dr. Gordon: The world is filled with chelators. Tetracycline, vitamin C, and lactic acid are chelators. Exercise is a chelator.
Q: Tetracycline? Do you mean the antibiotic?
Dr. Gordon: Yes, it sure is. See, that’s what is so confusing for a lot of people. We have lots of people who categorize a drug in a particular way and then people think that that’s all it does. Let’s say you’re talking about Dilantin, which is used by many people to control epilepsy. Well, what if it stops a totally different condition, like when you’re fearful of heights, agoraphobia? Then, obviously, you need to understand that it might be a basement membrane stabilizer.
So what I’m trying to drive at here is that we have some very confusing information going on because a drug that is listed as an anti-bacterial drug may also be a chelator. So we have people really confused in this medical world. Some people assume that if a drug they took was helpful in controlling seizures, and you got better, that you must have had some kind of an undiagnosed seizure disorder. So it always turns out that everything works on many levels and antibiotics are chelators.
But let’s try to remember that it would take fifteen years of consistent, without fail, chelating to remove all the toxic heavy metals from someone’s body. One needs to be pushing the lead, mercury, copper, and cadmium out of their body—excreting it through the feces, the sweat, and the urine—for fifteen years. I don’t want people to assume that tetracycline would be a great answer, but it’s important to understand that one of the ways that many antibiotics work is through chelation.
So let’s go to the top of the page again. Apple acid or malic acid is a great chelator. Garlic is a great chelator. In fact, these are the ones that I use. I make a joke of it and tell everybody that I’m just your friendly farmer. I have everybody taking my better grown EDTA. I have everybody on apple acid, because it is needed for everything that we do, and I have everybody on garlic. So you begin to get the idea that I really believe these are great foods.
Garlic is a really great chelator. But when the head of a company in Japan wanted to find a place to grow garlic I had to admit to him that any garlic that you raise in the central valley of California—if it’s within a quarter mile of the freeway—is going to be contaminated with lead because all freeways throw trash into the surrounding dirt.
In New Zealand, it is so dangerous to have your cow eat the grass that’s next to the road that your cow will get lead poisoning. This is because New Zealand doesn’t have the newer methods of refineries that we have that are relatively low lead. They have high-lead refineries and all the gas is loaded with lead. So any car going down the street is passing lead out from the exhaust and cadmium out from the wearing of tires. This is why if you use chelation, it’s really nice to have people test what they sell you. We measure the level of lead, arsenic, mercury, etc. in every product that we are involved in because so much of our agriculture is contaminated. A single cabbage that is grown just a hundred yards from a freeway in California can contain a thousand times the safe level of cadmium as a result of being next to a freeway.
Q: Can you talk about about the TACT study that NIH is funding?
Dr. Gordon: The big study that’s going on now is the Trial to Access Chelation Therapy—otherwise known as the TACT study—and it’s being funded to the tune of twenty-nine million dollars. Currently, it’s less than halfway through its five year study. The study is merely to test one thing—will people who use some chelation with an oral vitamin and mineral supplement during those five years have less heart attacks, or less of need for surgery, than the people who got a placebo? That is the question that the Trial to Access Chelation Therapy put up.
This study is not near and dear to me because it’s using the old outdated sodium EDTA that requires four hour treatments, which nobody really has time for anymore. The study really came out of my incorrect belief thirty years ago that I found Nirvana. I thought I had found the magic bullet to clean everybody’s arteries and we now know that we don’t have it. So, since I’m really much more focused on the long-term implications today, I’m sorry to see us waste our money on a study that only does a few chelations and then follows subjects for a few years.
It will probably come out as a slight benefit but no where near the kind of benefit that one is able to achieve if people are put on to the oral chelation after the I.V.s. I have nothing against I.V. I love I.V. chelation. It’s always going to be good. Asking if I was against I.V. chelation would be like asking would I be against simonizing my car? I’m never against a deep cleansing. But the problem is that I need to wash my car every day for the next fifty years in addition to the simonizing. So that’s the problem. We’ve got the simonizing and the washing confused. So we have some people saying, oh I took the I.V.s and that’s all I need. Well, that’s not all they need and that’s why I tell everyone to use the oral EDTA as well.
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