Your Hair Can Tell You More Than You Think

Trace Mineral Hair Analysis has created more controversy than you would imagine. Especially since testing of the hair is an accepted form of detecting lead, mercury, arsenic, drug residue and other essential biochemical variants in every autopsy room in America. So why all the fuss? Your hair can tell you more than you think. In fact, there has been widespread testing of hair for toxic metals, drugs and other biochemical markers for many years throughout the U.S. and the world. But it has always been confined to autopsy tables, making the results only informative after the person no longer has a need to know. Instead, there has been gradual research into using this type of testing for people as part of health screening in order to ascertain the levels of minerals and toxic metals that the body is storing in tissue.

Blood testing is wonderful to tell you what is circulating and available for cells throughout the body. But the truth is that the body will maintain blood chemistry at the expense of health and the lives of many cells. So when a problem is detected in blood testing, the effects are already well entrenched in the system. Instead, imagine being able to detect deficiencies in minerals and the accumulation of toxic metals long before they begin to affect our bodies. That is the possibility with Trace Mineral Hair Analysis.

By simply cutting a small amount of the hair closest to the scalp, specially trained lab facilities can provide a report that gives you the results of both long term and acute recent exposure to elements from food, water, and even the environment. This is a window into your metabolism at a cellular level, which is virtually invisible to most other types of testing. When the hair is in a growth state, it will express the blueprint of the cell from which it is emerging.

For example 30 to 40 days after an acute exposure to lead, there may be no detectable trace in the blood, but it will present itself in the hair. This is why hair is one of the body tissues chosen by the Environmental Protection Agency from which to make a determination of toxic metal exposure. "A 1980 report from the E.P.A. stated that human hair can be effectively used for biological monitoring of the highest priority toxic metals." — Trace Elements, Inc.

Once a mineral imbalance is shown on the report, it can be the driving factor towards examining the lifestyle and environment of the patient in order to find a healthier body balance. Things such as diet, stress, pollutants, genetics and even vitamin and mineral supplements may actually be creating imbalances in mineral levels in the body tissues over time.

Mercury and lead are two of the leading culprits in disease development. More and more government agencies, medical offices and even research laboratories are providing guidance to their staff against exposure to these debilitating toxic metals.

Mercury has been linked to Alzheimer’s Disease, arthritis, chronic headaches, cardiovascular disease and allergies. These were particularly shown on CBS’ 60 Minutes in a segment hosted by Morley Safer. Two industrialized countries, Sweden and Germany have banned the use of mercury as dental filling material, but it is still legal in the United States, although it has been outlawed since 1990 from interior latex house paints. So we cannot have it in our homes, but we can have it in our mouths. In fact, only recently, Massachusetts declared mercury a toxic waste material and have enacted statutes to guide its appropriate disposal.

Tests have shown conclusively that every time the dental amalgam filling is chewed upon for ten minutes, 4 micrograms of mercury escape from each filling, which includes 0.4 micrograms of poisonous vapor into the brain tissue. It also combines with natural oral and intestinal bacteria producing methyl mercury, an even more toxic form of mercury with target areas being primarily the pituitary gland, thyroid gland and the brain. It also produces destructive changes in the mucous membranes of the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts. The movement of mercurial compounds through the blood cause rapid release of vital calcium from the bones. It also destroys all sulfur-containing enzymes in the body.

Mercury can also combine with other toxic metals in the body such as Arsenic, Cadmium or Aluminum to form electrical action that corrodes natural tissue, resulting in unexplained pain, ulcerations, inflammation and disruption of natural body processes. As far back as 1 988, The Environmental Protection Agency labeled scrap dental amalgams as a hazardous waste, declaring it was highly dangerous for anyone to come in contact with the amalgam material in any way. So once it is removed from a patient’s mouth it is considered hazardous material and must be disposed of in an isolated format or face thousands of dollars in fines.

For more information, please read Toxic Metal Syndrome: How Metal Poisonings Can Affect Your Brain by Dr. H. Richard Casdorph and Dr. Morton Walker.