Q: Can you talk about the difference between calcium EDTA and other forms of EDTA?
Dr. Gordon: Yes. With all of the research out there, there will be people that will be more interested in the sodium EDTA. I emphasized the use of sodium EDTA when I coauthored the book The Chelation Answer with Morton Walker because, as an expert in aging, I’ve been very sensitive to the fact that we appear to be killed by calcium. That sounds like a strong statement with people being told to take calcium, but those of us who are in the know will tell you, without question, the way to kill any nerve cell is to put it in a solution of glutamate and calcium.
Glutamate is a very important part of things that go on in our body, and one is unable to entirely avoid glutamate because it is a part of our diet. Doctors even prescribe it because it helps to heal the stomach. Foods from parmesan cheese to tomatoes and peas all wind up producing glutamate in your body. Unfortunately, the glutamate is what we say sets the gun, and when you add calcium it pulls the trigger. It takes the two of them—the glutamate and calcium—to kill nerve cells. Everybody kind of understands that the older they get the weaker their bones are and they become more and more demineralized. Yet any doctor doing radiology will tell you that the older the person is the easier it is to see the calcium accumulation on the person’s blood vessels. In some people you can see the blood vessels even without putting dye inside the body because there’s so much calcium lining their arteries.
What is average? At age eighty you will have on your aorta—the main blood vessel coming out of your heart—one hundred and forty times more calcium than it had age ten. So, in a sense, it almost becomes like a piece of PVC pipe. When you do an autopsy you actually have to have shears to cut through and remove the heart from the dead person because the aorta is such a rigid pipe. I have spent my life teaching what things like boron, exercise, magnesium, and adequate levels of vitamin K-2 and vitamin D do. That’s all covered on my Web site under the word “calcification” or “calcinosis” or “pathologic calcification.” So, it would sound then as though nobody would ever want to use calcium EDTA if calcium is such a bad guy.
But we get to some other issues here. We use the sodium EDTA because if you look at the ascending order for which particular atoms EDTA likes to bind to—which is well-proven in analytical chemistry—you see that there are certain ones that it likes more than others. EDTA is a weak chelator for things like calcium and magnesium, and it is a powerful chelator for things like lead, mercury, cadmium, and chromium. By this we mean, how strong or weak is the affinity between the EDTA and these various substances? We used sodium EDTA, and we put it in people’s veins because we knew that it loved calcium enough that it would make the calcium in your body relatively scarce during the time we gave you a sodium chelation I.V. treatment.
In other words, if I bubbled it into your arm through an I.V. tube—giving it drip drip drip over a four hour period—during that time the calcium in your blood stream would go down to half normal levels. This might scare some doctors. They would say, my goodness, your going to kill this patient if he or she doesn’t have any calcium. You do need calcium in the blood in order to enable a muscle to contract, so obviously by lowering it that much the body says wow, this is pretty hard and pretty scary. The body then reacts by tripling the output of a gland called the parathyroid, which puts out a little parathyroid hormone. This then causes the body to put calcium back into the solution, making it available to then replace the calcium that I have temporarily tied up with the EDTA.
So this means that the EDTA has temporarily got a new partner and they’re dancing through the blood vessels. However, this is not a partner that the EDTA wants to have for life, because EDTA really would prefer to find lead for a lifetime partner. Other metals, like zinc, it just likes a lot. So because people have these hard rigid arteries that are lined with calcium we realized that if we could put some of that calcium back into the solution then sodium EDTA was a good choice. However, sodium EDTA did not go in the arm painlessly. It actually causes some aching, some pain, and a little spasm of the vessels. So it can sometimes be difficult to sit in a chair for four hours.
Now that would be okay if you could really have everyone reliably do that. Every person would have a huge benefit. If you could make all the plaque in people’s arteries go away then they won’t ever need bypass surgery. But they need to be sitting in the chair for four hours, thirty times, fifty times, or a hundred times. Many patients have needed a hundred chelations. Intravenous chelation therapy is very safe. In the over ten million people treated with intravenous chelation there haven’t been any deaths. So it wasn’t a bad deal, but you have to measure that against the following facts. We did see an improvement in blood flow in eighty-six percent of the patients treated.They could walk further, go up hills or more flights of stairs, and have less leg cramps and chest pain. They developed better vision and lots of other dramatic things happened.
We treated ten million people. After enough time went by we became aware that although we had improved blood flow, we hadn’t really gotten all the junk out of the artery. So then we had to sit back and say, wait a minute. The person is getting a dramatic benefit. He thinks I’m a genius. But in some cases we actually witnessed that the blockage in the artery had increased. In some cases it had been at sixty percent when we started treatment and was now up to a seventy percent blockage. You sit there and say, wait a minute, how can that be? My arteries are actually more blocked but I’m now able to jog again. I can play golf again. I can run up stairs again. What’s going on?
Obviously, it gets really complicated inside the human body. A lot of the blood vessels are what we call collatoral, and they are very tiny, like capillaries. They can not be seen on an arteriogram. So what really happens in the body needs sophisticated testing, not the outdated arteriogram on people that have been cut open. Every year we cut open half a million people doing some kind of surgery based on a totally misleading test called an angiogram, which only looks at the highway and doesn’t look at the detour sites around a blocked artery. A detour site would be like if you went through the farmer’s field. It’s a dirt road, but it gets around the obstruction and everybody gets to St. Louis on time. Then you didn’t need to have such a big fuss about the obstruction. So in order to find that, you need a PET scan.
A PET scan is expensive, and it’s not widely available, so people continue to be operated on for non-urgent reasons. This is because what they can see on the arteries is never actually what’s going to kill them. In fact, it’s so sad. The plaque that kills you doesn’t show up in the angiogram because it’s in the wall of the vessel. But that’s another topic. That’s under the topic “vulnerable plaque.” The patients that were getting the sodium EDTA could lower the pathologic calcium in their blood vessels but we didn’t get rid of all the plaque. So then we had to sit there and say, what is going on?
Finally, after thirty years of banging our heads against the wall, we began to realize that lead has more of a toxic effect on the body than we had ever dreamed. When we started we knew that any form of chelation—calcium EDTA, sodium EDTA, magnesium EDTA, all of these—would grab lead, but, at the time, we never really believed that lead, mercury, and cadmium were such a big problem for human beings. So we ignored the obvious. Then we finally realized, hey wait a minute, if we use the calcium EDTA then it’s entirely painless. We can give the treatment in three or four minutes and you’re out of the office and back to work. So it doesn’t cost you four hours of your productive income, and you’re not paying the doctor a huge sum of money to have to be observed by competent people while an I.V. is running in your arm.
So it was win-win. What happened is we became aware that because the EDTA was painlessly administered, we could get it in fast enough to get it up to a higher level of concentration. The sodium EDTA was so painful that you had to administer it very slow—drip drip drip. But the calcium EDTA, because it goes in so much more rapidly, was actually more like a deep wax simonize than a wash job. If you administer the sodium EDTA you were helping everybody, but weren’t getting a deep cleansing of the lead, mercury, and cadmium.
Then we begin to wake up to the fact that clearing the body of the heavy metals themselves was the primary reason that people could now run up the stairs, because of nitric oxide and things related to that. Also, EDTA improves blood viscosity, or the thickness of the blood. If your blood is thick like honey you can’t walk up and down steps. If it’s thin like wine you can you walk up and down just fine. But those are all different topics. All these different forms of EDTA confuse people. I have finally gotten people to wake up to the fact that calcium EDTA works at least as well as the sodium EDTA. That was a shock because ten million people sat in the chair as I did for four hours, taking up a lot of valuable time with an aching arm. Now, worldwide, more and more doctors are switching to calcium EDTA. Calcium EDTA, by the way, is added by the ton to our food, but it’s only added in enough quantities to protect the food from spoiling.
Now I’ve raised the level so that we take it in supplements and get enough—not only to protect the garlic and the other things that are in the supplements from ever turning bad—but also enough to protect the human body. So just like Dow is legally allowed to tell people that you add their EDTA to foodstuff to prevent spoiling, I tell every one of my patients that I don’t want them to spoil on me either. Everybody knows that we have all kinds substances that have been used in an effort to prevent spoilage, but most people never think about their body spoiling. There is this process called lipid peroxidation—when fats turn rancid—and everybody may have heard by now that if fat is rancid it can kill your dog if you give it to him. So you don’t keep things around that are rancid.
What I’m trying to teach people is that EDTA does many things, and we have to have enough in our body at all times. Just think of the intestinal tract itself. There is more bacteria in your intestine than there are cells in your body. There are a lot of biochemical reactions going on and technically some of those bacteria are responsible for converting your food into useful nutrients. For example, B-6, folic acid, and some vitamin K are not in their active form until they’re acted upon in the gut. But if you don’t tie up and protect the human body from interactions with the toxic metals that are in our water, food, and air, then you have a lot of free radicals going on in your intestines. This is why we have a needless epidemic of colon cancer.
My position is very simple. Many many people attack the use of oral chelation that utilizes any form of EDTA. They say that when you put EDTA in your veins it is a hundred percent absorbed and I can’t deny that. It clearly is, and in one four hour infusion you can get some of the same benefits you might get from a month of using the oral form of EDTA. But even if you never wanted to take the oral form of EDTA, you would be well-advised to take some every day because of the epidemic of colon cancer today. This is due to the interaction between various molecules in the intestinal track that wind up becoming what we call oxidized biosalts, which can lead to the formation of very toxic substances.
These very toxic substances wind up inside ninety-nine percent of all people in America today. When we test people’s bowel movements we find carcinogens and mutagens in their feces. These people are bathing their poor colon in substances that are so toxic that it’s a wonder that everybody doesn’t get colon cancer. By merely adding EDTA you prevent all of those lipid peroxidises and other reactions from going on because you are eliminating the metals that catalyze those bad reactions.
So I have my bias with calcium EDTA because it’s well tolerated. I’ve already said these nasty things about calcium, and how much I don’t like taking tons of calcium supplements every day because it’s not the answer that everybody’s being told it is. If you look at Chinese peasants they have strong bones at age ninety, and they have a total daily intake of calcium at approximately a third what we get in our diet. So people are not in need of calcium, but they’re being lied to for complex reasons, and it’s a great business. The calcium EDTA that I’ve chosen to use in both the I.V. and oral forms is there for a specific purpose to do a specific job. In the form of the I.V. it’s because it’s painless, allowing me to get a high enough concentration to really do a deep cleansing and move a lot of lead out of the person’s body in a short time. This makes it more economical and cost effective.
In the oral form, amazingly enough, I’m still getting a win-win because every human being in America does have to take some calcium supplementation, even though I don’t like it, because we have so much phosphorus in our diet—from soft drinks and the high ingestion of meat. So when you look at my work on pathologic calcification as a cause of aging you will see that I tell people that they don’t need that much calcium. When you look at the heath-assessment nutrition evaluation by the United States government and the NIH, and if you read all their papers, you’ll see that the average person gets 1300 milligrams of phosphorus and about 800 milligrams of calcium per day.
So I have to give you about four or five hundred milligrams of calcium a day. In my oral form of chelation you’re only getting roughly sixty, seventy, or eighty milligrams of calcium, so it’s not going to perturb the balance in the wrong way. I’m bringing in the EDTA that I do need in a form that is able to move lead out of people’s body. And the amount of lead that comes out has been researched by Los Alamos Research Laboratory, and even they scratch their heads and say, wait a minute, how does this work out?
_http://www.smart-publications.com/articles/dr-garry-gordon-interview-the-health-benefits-of-EDTA-chelation-therap/page-3
