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Chelation Therapy; AHA Recommendation from http://www.americanheart.org

I.V. EDTA chelation or Oral EDTA chelation? from Anonymous

Chelation Therapy; AHA Recommendation from http://www.americanheart.org

The American Heart Association has reviewed the available literature on using chelation (ke-LA'shun) (E.D.T.A., ethylenediamine tetraacetic acid) to treat arteriosclerotic (ar-te"re-o-skleh-ROT'ik) heart disease. We found no scientific evidence to demonstrate any benefit from this form of therapy.

Chelation therapy is a recognized treatment for heavy metal (such as lead) poisoning. EDTA, injected into the blood, will bind the metals and allow them to be removed from the body in the urine. Chelation therapy is not approved by the FDA to treat coronary artery disease, but some physicians and alternative medicine practitioners use it for this purpose.

Up to now, there have been no adequate, controlled, published scientific studies using currently approved scientific methodology to support this therapy for cardiovascular disease. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American College of Cardiology all agree with the American Heart Association on this point.

In August 2002, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), which are both components of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced that they have launched the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT). This will be the first large-scale, multicenter study to find out if EDTA chelation therapy is safe and effective for people with coronary heart disease. This placebo-controlled, double-blind study will involve 2,372 participants age 50 years and older who’ve had a heart attack. They will be representative of the U.S. population. TACT will be more than 20 times larger than any prior study of chelation therapy — large enough to show if chelation therapy has mild or moderate benefits.

This study is being done because there is a public health need to conduct a large, well-designed clinical trial to find out if chelation therapy is safe and effective for treating people with coronary heart disease. If people use chelation therapy and it doesn’t work, they may be deprived of the well-established benefits from the many other valuable methods of treating these diseases, such as lifestyle modifications, medications and surgical procedures.

The trial will take place at about 100 research sites across the United States and will test EDTA chelation therapy by using the most widely practiced means of administering it. Participants will begin being recruited in March 2003; patients will receive 30 weekly intravenous treatments, then 10 more treatments given bimonthly, over a 28-month period. They will also receive high doses of vitamins, which are also often given with chelation therapy. (The effect of such vitamin doses will also be examined in the trial.) Once recruitment begins, the study will take about five years to complete. To learn more about this study, visit nccam.nih.gov and ClinicalTrials.gov.

I.V. EDTA chelation or Oral EDTA chelation? from Anonymous

Most chelation therapy carried out today involves I.V. administration of EDTA, however, oral EDTA, which has a history at least as long as its I.V. cousin, is an option that is only now starting to be appreciated. Clinical experience suggests that oral chelation provides some, but not all, of the benefits of I.V. therapy. Overall, the difference in benefits is more one of degree and speed than of quality.

IV chelation therapy

I.V. therapy has a direct and powerful effect on the body almost instantaneously. An I.V. session usually lasts about 3 to 4 hours, during which about 1500 mg to 3000 mg of EDTA (plus vitamin C and other nutrients) are administered. The number of treatments necessary (generally about 20-50 sessions) depends on the individual's condition. Candidates for I.V. chelation are people that have been diagnosed with serious atherosclerosis, heavy metal poisoning, or symptoms of vascular occlusion or significant calcification of tissues.

Only about 5% to 10% of an oral dose of EDTA is absorbed, compared with 100% of an I.V. dose. Therefore, the time and dosage required to achieve the same benefits with the oral form are quite different. What can be achieved in only a few hours with I.V. EDTA chelation may take several weeks or months with oral EDTA chelation. However, oral EDTA may be appropriate for people whose condition does not demand rapid action. For example, oral chelation can be used to:
· avoid complications and diseases that result from heavy metals and calcification
· prevent the formation of blood clots, thus reducing your chance of a heart attack or stroke
· lower the level of blood cholesterol
· help thin the blood
· aid in reducing lipid peroxidation, a major cause of atherosclerosis

Oral EDTA is not meant to replace I.V. therapy for those people who have serious vascular disease. It is very useful, though, for people who have completed an I.V. course and want to stay on a maintenance program, for people who "for whatever reason" are unable or unwilling to undergo I.V. chelation, and for those whose I.V. treatments may have been interrupted.

The Politics of EDTA Chelation

Organizations like the American Heart Association and the American Medical Association, which condemn EDTA chelation as ineffective for treating vascular disease, often quote the Danish and New Zealand studies, mentioned earlier, to support their position. What they fail to mention is that the Danish studies were criticized by the Danish Committee for Investigation into Scientific Dishonesty because of improper randomization and double-blinding, as well as premature breaking of the blinding code, which amounted to a deliberate bias. When the results of the New Zealand study were examined by 2 independent statisticians, it was concluded that the trial actually supported the efficacy of EDTA.

It is unlikely that any other issue in modern medicine has been more highly politicized than that of EDTA chelation therapy, and it is clear that most of the opposition to EDTA is due to the threat this therapy represents, not to patients' health but to the bank balances of orthodox physicians, pharmaceutical companies, and hospitals. Treating cardiovascular diseases is big business in the United States (and the rest of the Western world), bringing in tens of billions of dollars each year.

Each coronary bypass surgery procedure costs between $25,000 and $50,000. Each angioplasty costs about $15,000. Drugs for reducing cholesterol, lowering high blood pressure, and normalizing heart rhythm bring the pharmaceutical industry hundreds of millions of dollars each year. And these are just the most common examples. What happens when you add EDTA chelation therapy to this mix?

A course of I.V. EDTA chelation therapy costs between $2000 and $4000, oral EDTA is even less costly. To the degree that these therapies reduce the need for the more expensive conventional therapies - a large degree, indeed - they threaten to diminish the income of a significant portion of the medical establishment. Consider this one example: as noted earlier, in a study of 65 patients who were treated with I.V. EDTA while they were waiting for coronary bypass surgery surgery, 58 (89%) no longer required the procedure. At $50,000 per procedure not done, that means that surgeons and hospitals gave up nearly $3 million just for these few patients. Now remember, that coronary bypass surgery is the most common surgical procedure performed in the US (368,000 in 1989).

Oral Edta Chelation And The Medical Profession

Given these figures, it's not hard to understand why the medical profession is so in love with coronary bypass surgery and related procedures. As one physician noted, "It pays the bills." So enamored are they of these procedures that they perform them even when they are not necessary. In an article published in no less prestigious a publication than the "Journal of the American Medical Association", the authors concluded that only 56% of the surgeries performed were for appropriate reasons, 30% for equivocal reasons, and 14% for inappropriate reasons.

The percentage of appropriate surgeries varied from 37% in some hospitals to 78% in others. When you consider that even when it is "appropriate," coronary bypass surgery surgery is no better than conventional medical treatments for improving survival, you have to wonder whether the real "miracle" of heart surgery does not entail bringing people back from death's door, as much as turning a common chronic degenerative disease into a source of outrageous fortune. If you needed one example of why the cost of health care - disease care, really - has gone into earth orbit, you need look no further than the conventional treatment of heart disease. Health spending in the U.S. is examined in more detail here.

Given these figures, it's also not very hard to understand why the medical profession has reacted so violently against physicians who practice chelation therapy, often attempting to put them out of business. Because EDTA has long been approved for treating heavy metal poisoning, and because physicians are free to use any "approved" medication for any use they see fit, as long it does not endanger the patient, EDTA chelation therapy is perfectly legal. This has not stopped medical boards in a number of states from bringing charges against physicians who prescribe EDTA chelation for vascular disease, smearing them as "quacks," and attempting to restrict the use of this therapy. Fortunately, most of these attempts have failed.

You can be certain that if EDTA had a large pharmaceutical company advocating its use, these problems would quickly evaporate. But since the patent for EDTA ran out nearly 30 years ago, there are no huge profits to be made from marketing it. With no pot of gold at the end of the EDTA rainbow, no one is going to put up the hundreds of millions of dollars required to do the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials required to get the FDA to approve EDTA for vascular disease. And with few large, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials to refer to, the conventional medical establishment feels justified in condemning EDTA therapy as "unproven." It's a familiar "Catch 22" that faces all natural or unpatentable therapies.

While most American physicians choose to remain blind to the benefits of EDTA, those who prescribe it are free to witness its life-enhancing benefits on a daily basis. One of those physicians is Dr. Garry Gordon, whose own life was saved by EDTA and who has been a leader in chelation therapy since the early 1960s. "I have taken on patients who were inoperable, who had already had every known form of bypass surgery, who had no more veins in their legs to strip out and put into their heart, and who were sent home to die, and I could get those people back to full functioning," says Dr. Gordon.

Because EDTA removes heavy metals from the body, it is important to supplement your diet with a good multi-mineral supplement while taking EDTA, to avoid any mineral deficiency, especially in zinc. I recommend you supplement your diet with a multi-vitamin/mineral supplement, as well as a calcium-magnesium-zinc supplement. The EDTA product I recommend can be found here . You can find the best price on high quality multimineral supplements on the internet here .

There are other important components which make up a successful oral chelation therapy. Components such as N-acetyl-cysteine (NAC), and chlorella which binds heavily to mercury.

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