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Chemicals are increasingly present in our homes, cars and
even our food. Thousands of new synthetic chemicals come
into manufactured consumer products every year with no safety
testing or public approval process. Since the beginning
of the petrochemical industry more than 80,000 new chemicals
have come to circulate in consumer products. Through our
lungs, skin and GI tract, we are soaking up chemicals that
we'd be hard-pressed to spell or pronounce, if we could
even find out what they were. Human fat tissue sampled in
the United States has shown 700 chemical contaminants that
have not been chemically identified.
A Mt. Sinai School
of Medicine study last year found that each of nine volunteers
averaged 91 chemical compounds in the blood and urine. Of
the 167 chemicals discovered among the volunteers tested,
94 are toxic to the brain or nervous system, 76 are carcinogenic
and 79 are linked to birth defects. The volunteers tested
do not work with chemicals on the job, nor do they live
close to an industrial facility. Rather, they represent
the average body burden of an ordinary American citizen.
Furthermore, chemicals that are foreign to the body, or
xenobiotics (xeno = foreign or not naturally occurring)
tend to accumulate in the tissues over time. Worse, children,
playing on the floor and breathing more air than adults,
acquire chemical body burdens faster than adults. This,
then holds true for our pets as well, who share our environment.
This is not simply a minor disruption to optimal health.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution
causes 2.7 million deaths annually. The EPA estimates that
there has been no "clean air" in the United States
for over 25 years. Even relatively pristine areas are not
immune, because global air currents carry pesticides from
the heavily agricultural tropical regions even as far as
the polar regions, where cool air sinks them to ground level.
This has given the Inuit a very high body burden of chemicals,
despite their remote existence in mostly wilderness areas.
But as bad as all this is, indoor air pollution is even
worse.
The formaldehyde
and other solvents leaking out of our walls, furniture and
especially carpets keep many, perhaps most of us, in a limbo
between good health and vague malaise. According to a study
in Effective Clinical Practice in April 1999, three out
of four Americans have a diagnosable chronic condition.
Against this bleak backdrop, the emerging field of Environmental
Medicine, a specialty within naturopathic medicine, offers
a means for people to reduce their total body burden of
synthetic chemicals. Patients with conditions that have
completely stumped conventional doctors, conditions such
as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, lupus, asthma, multiple
sclerosis and migraines, are now finding relief and reversal
of symptoms through the various cleansing procedures employed
in environmental medicine. Animals now suffer and carry
the same disorders and diseases as their human companions.
Walter Crinnion, a naturopathic medical doctor and pioneer
in the emerging field of environmental medicine at Southwest
College of Medicine, Tempe AZ, prefers to use the term "cleanse"
rather than "detoxify," because our enormous bodily
burden of xenobiotics has so thoroughly confused the normal
detoxification processes of the liver, that the liver can
make some chemicals even more dangerous in the attempt to
detoxify. Not having either evolved or been created to process
these strange substances, the liver quite literally does
not know what to do with them, and in breaking them down
can liberate even more dangerous components.
Therefore, the
first goal of environmental medicine is "avoidance,"
simply avoiding exposure to chemical toxins. Failing that,
as constantly happens, the next goal of environmental medicine,
is to grab the macromolecule before it breaks down and haul
it out of the body before it can do much harm. However,
most patients don't begin to seek help from environmental
medical specialists until years of bombardment with toxic
chemicals have taken a huge toll on the health. So what
we are then dealing with in many cases are the metabolites,
or bodily-derived chemicals, from the original pollutants.
The body's unfamiliarity
with synthetic chemicals sometimes prevents it from processing
them at all, and they are simply stored in fat cells, as
the ultimate repository of strange items. As a result, overweight
people have even more of a body burden than the rest of
us. Thus, environmental health issues are the direct cause
for many of the symptoms we are seeing in the animal population
today that were unheard of even 25 years ago.
Some of the cleansing processes involve coaxing fat-bound
substances away from fat cells. Because the brain is 60%
fat it can be a primary storage site of these chemicals.
Mercury is very strongly attracted to fat, which is much
of the reason why children poisoned with mercury from vaccines
and amalgam dental fillings can exhibit autistic and hyperactive
symptoms. According to Dr. Crinnion, the majority of xenobiotics
undergo metabolic changes, known as biotransformation, in
which fat-soluble compounds are converted into water-soluble
compounds allowing them to be excreted. For these compounds,
Dr. Crinnion's strategy is to help this excretion process,
both by assisting the normal cleansing processes in the
liver, and by removing obstacles to those processes introduced
by other xenobiotics.
Many pharmaceuticals
can act as obstacles to the liver's cleansing process. Also,
high sugar consumption as well as protein deprivation are
both obstacles to optimal cleansing function of the liver.
Various vitamins, mineral and amino acid deficiencies also
inhibit the liver from effective cleansing. So what is the
"toxic bucket?" It is the body, descended from
eons of pure-air breathing, whole-food eating, clean-water
drinking ancestors, who lived in perfect biochemical harmony
with their earth. But the toxic bucket is really the modern
body, descended from that beautiful harmonious existence,
now tarnished and contaminated with chemicals that enter
continually through every orifice and pore.
The assault on
living tissue from the huge numbers of synthetic chemicals
in our environment is a life-threatening challenge for a
planet and its inhabitants that are not acclimated to such
substances. Thus the most effective therapeutic approach
for the chemical-laden patient involves several steps: avoidance
of further exposure, dietary changes and cleansing procedures.
Naturopathic physicians
are trained during four years of naturopathic medical school
in the procedures necessary to help patients keep their
"bucket" of toxic substances as empty as possible,
and to help the cleansed body function as well as possible.
Information taken from facts.
www.environmentalworkinggroup.com
See Natropathy
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