From Burnout to Breakthrough: How Chip got back to living (Part 2)

Heavy Metal Exposure in Childhood and Trades 0:00

If this all was built up in my system when I was young, then that means I would have given it to my children. So then I decided I'm going to test my daughter, who's 22, and see where her lead levels were. This was all before I was 30 years old at the minimum, probably all during college and growing up. So now I'm like, we have to stop this downward slope. I like saying to my daughter, before you ever have children, We got to get this out of your body. Welcome to the deeper healing podcast. This is for everyone who's been dismissed, misdiagnosed or told to just live with it and refuse to accept that answer.

You're going to hear amazing patient recovery stories, raw and real in their own words. People who found answers after everything had failed them. You are going hear from medical experts we trust that are pioneering new approaches to healing the body. Because we deeply know we're designed to heal. Let's dig in. Welcome back to the deeper healing podcast and we are going to talk to Chip again. We just got to talking after the podcast that we recorded and I found it very interesting how he was exposed to heavy metals.

And he's a contractor and or builder and does build his cabinetry. And, you know, for a lot of listeners out there, I feel like the heavy metal talk can get a little confusing and people are kind of like, what is heavy metals? How do we get them? People think they're in our water, they are, lead pipes. We think of big ones like lead and mercury. There's some other ones. Chip was exposed, his levels came up and a couple different ones were elevated. I'm trying to pull them up actually right now. But the interesting thing is the mercury came out really, really high on your levels.

And you were telling me how you think you had your exposure. So let's dive into that a little bit. Yeah, I grew up in a electrical apparatus family, meaning that my grandfather started a electrical company in the 20s, 1920s. And then my dad took it over. Then, of course, I worked there from when I was six to 32, seems like. So the electrical world has a lot of mercury involved. switches, breakers, it's everywhere in the old electrical world. And mercury was used on some of the soldering devices.

It was a commonly used metal or an alloy that Uh, was just heavily used in the electrical world. We, we saw exposed buckets of mercury and so how it was used as connectivity between two points. Um, everybody's thermostat in their home had mercury in it. I mean, you, it, uh, as commonplace. And so, You know, Sitting with jewels and talking about, you know, I'm thinking the mad hatter's disease. I like am I going to die? You know and then she's like, well, your mother probably gave you a ton of it.

You were born with it And it came back to, okay, I was exposed to it in a lot of places. Being in the contracting world, remodeling and building homes, not so much the new homes but, you know, we're in Charleston. I mean, some of these houses have been here forever. And the lead and the mercury that was just used in building products world whether it was to help save the, keep other animals out of the wood I've heard of them using mercury to soak wood in to help keep termites and rot and things like that out.

You're in tearing some of these houses out, stuff out of the house and you're exposed to lead and exposed the mercury. I know you know, you are supposed to wear a mask, but what good is that little mask going to do? Sometimes you hot, your heavy, hard to breathe and just don't wear it. Don't do anything. So your levels of exposure to that. You know, it just made me reflect on how much of it I was around and then what it's doing to me. You just don't put two and two together until the reverse reaction to living that lifestyle and being in those environments and work now showed up, reared its ugly head.

And if I'd known this now, what I was doing back then, then I would have started this stuff earlier. Don't wait till it gets so bad, you just feel like there's no help or hope. And would've really changed the course of action in getting myself better. Yeah. Well, one of the reasons I think this is such an important conversation, because we see a lot of men And that are contractors and that our builders around here and they're on site. And I, I mean, we have a handful of them that have come through deeper healing where we're seeing the same pattern of this heavy metal exposure and you look at their history and we're like, holy cow.

It's funny, not only just the trades, but anyone is doing demo, anyone who's doing paint. I know you're probably not painting your cabinets, they're coming painted, and a lot of people are building and painting. The the pilots, the flight attendants, these are all occupations with high metals. The chemicals on the hairdressers. I mean, there's so many occupation. So you're I don't want to say rare. A lot of people when they get their medals results. They're completely shocked. They were like, wait, I had no idea.

You had a clue. I'm sure when you were getting that test done, you're like oh, boy. OK. My test came back saying that my mercury was so high that everything else on there was inconclusive because it was blocking a good lead reading. Now the lead came out being awful.

How Mercury and Lead Build Up in the Body 6:29

It's way into the red. But it basically said, Jules said the rest of this says that you're positive for it, but we can't get a good reading because the mercury is just so high. And it just scares you. I mean, you are scared straight, basically. And knowing that, wow, how did I get this? What did do to myself? Because we see these things like, oh, you ate fish. Wow. I mean, really? Is that where it all came from? No, I eat fish, but I don't eat a lot of it. So where else would I be? And then it really, being pushed, okay, let's think about what was there.

And I'm like wow. I'm not heavy into the electrical world anymore, but wow, I lived so many years in that. I was exposed to it as a child because I went to work with my dad. It was just in buckets, draining it out. Where did that go? Is that like buckets of fluoride? Where'd it go, did they just pour it down to drain? I often have thoughts like that. I used to be in a dark room all the time where you'd have all of the development chemicals, and it was at a school where it's running all time, I'm like, where do they do all that stuff?

It even got worse for me. It is true. Where did it go? Down the drain is probably where they deal with it. So then in thinking of the mercury and stuff, then the anger started coming on like, how dare my dad? And then my uncle and my cousin both are dentists. Of course, we went to them for dentist and what were they doing? Fill in every cavity with some mercury-based amalgam that just worsened the problem. But the knowledge was not there that we were doing something wrong. We thought we we're doing right, but I paid the price for it, right?

I'm the one that's damaged by it. But I can't blame anybody. It's just something that is there. At least I know what the problem is and how we are getting rid of it? Well, I'll share my story with you. You know, my metals, I decided, what drove me to test myself was I saw a 12-year-old at Deeper Healing get a really high heavy metal test. And I'm like... Twelve years old. How's this little kid have such high metals? And i'm, like, okay, i better check myself. You, know I,m thinking I am so clean, got my filtered water, you know all the things.

I really got clean when my son was born 27 years ago, premature. So,I'm thinking i am good. feel healthy, not really having any health complaints, knock on wood. And my results came back really high lead, really High Mercury. It was like, have you worked in a factory? Are you a veteran? No, I'm a suburban mom. Haven't done any of those things. Didn't work in an electrical business. I was thinking, my God, if this is what my Like, God help everybody else who's not even working in a foundry or a car or doing anything.

I mean, just a mechanic. Cars have mercury in them. We're exposed to mercury just being in the car with the carpet of mercury. They use it as a cleaner. Yeah, we have no idea. We have idea where all this stuff was. And we say, okay, even you go back to the construction world, I mean, lead pipes, leads solder, led this, LED that. Lead was in the switching that we had. I means, it's everywhere. Well, you know, everyone started talking about Flint, the lead pipe, so the whole thing in Flint. Michigan.

And that got me thinking, I was like, is Flint an anomaly? Flint is not an Anomaly. That's the thing no one's talking about. They're all like off in arms about this one city. When I started thinking about my lead, I lived in Philadelphia, old city pipes. And I'm like, if this all was built up in my system when I was young, then that means I would have given it to my children. So then I decided I am going to test my daughter, who's 22, and see where her lead levels were. Her lead is super high. I said, okay, this means this was all before I was 30 years old at the minimum, probably all during college and growing up.

So now I'm like, we have to stop this downward slope. I say to my daughter, before you ever have children, you've got to get this out of your body. And I saw a TikTok guy talking about, if you need to check your metals. You know, he's right. That's a test that people don't really get. No one's really recommending it. Yeah. It's like 40, you get your colonoscopy. We're like at deeper healing, 40 test your heavy metals. Test your metals seriously. And even younger, like I'm, my daughter looks very healthy and she seems healthy.

This lead is going to get her and it's going get me too. And definitely, I would pay a million dollars to go into some of these memory care facilities and test all these older people's models. Guaranteed. Oh, they're loaded. All the cognitive issues because of this. I'd love to see. And it starts to skip on the record and then it skips again. You can still hear the song, so there's nothing wrong with it. But I still know the words to the songs. It skps more and more until the point that's like And then it's like dementia, Alzheimer's, getting old, just getting olds, we used to age really sharp.

I mean, like I knew lots of people who aged very sharp into their nineties, could run circles. And now we're just, every time I turn around, there's a new memory care facility. You know, I think it is. Well, you know my story with my mom. So my Mom had dementia. and unfortunately passed a couple of years ago, but she had very high mercury and lead and her lead actually was higher than the mercury. And I think she was a hairdresser and she owned her own hair salon and this was back. So there was lead in hair dye back in the day.

Her being exposed to all of that, I thinks, is a piece of herdiment. She also went through chemotherapy, which I What that does on the brain, exactly, more toxins and they told us that she could have some memory issues. But you add the heavy metals in on top of that. I would love to see, I mean, gosh, if we could just go in and be like, can you please pee in this cup for us and let us test it? Like it would be off the charts. Like that, from everything that I know, and I've been doing this for 20 years now, seeing what I knew with kids and this new generation coming up,

Testing Family Members and Generational Exposure 14:05

pretty confident, a lot of their cognitive decline, when we talk about ADHD, You know, any kind of focus like dyslexia, like when you start getting into a lot of the cognitive issues that these kids, it's heavy metals need to be the first thing that the parents go after. I know. When were you exposed? Well, they got it from us, which is the sad part. It's like we're the generations like our parents. And once you have it, it attracts more of it really quickly, right? Not necessarily, no. You're just kind of your total body burden is already maxed out.

So when more comes on top of, like those neuro pathways and things just aren't, your body can only tolerate so much. It's like that bucket's full. If you're born and your buckets already halfway full, and then here you go right out the gate. I mean, I won't even start talking about the stuff I want to talk about with like what we do to children when they're born. They get about 78 of them now these days that have heavy metals in them. I think that that contributes to it. And then are they able to detox?

Some kids can detox and some can't. The older we're getting, our detox pathways are compromised. That's a genetic thing, but it's also sometimes it is fixable in the way you're supposed to. I could have led from her. We never went the opposite way. I just went downstream at my daughter. Our parents were the generation that grew up with it, and they passed it along to us. And then we're having kids. that are even more maxed out. So it's this. And now, like, I mean, our kids, well, here's the problem.

Most people can't even get pregnant now. Like, let's talk about that. Toxin levels are so high. I think it is all related. The metals might not be the reason. There is a lot more behind the infertility stuff. The metal piece, I think, is just really, really important. I don't think doctors are talking about this. It's a confusing subject for people. Kind of like the EMF thing. They're kind of, like, what's electro? I mean, frequency. Like, oh, that, and I have to worry about that. People are like heavy metals.

You know, military. Yeah. And you're like no, listen, if you are, the biggest thing I wanted to get across because my mom had dementia and knowing what I know and then hearing your story and aging and seeing what we've seen a deeper healing with some of these other people, especially in the contractor, like for my men out there. Like if you are, you know, on the site, doing demolition, contract work, you know, cabinetry. Like these men are doing really manly things and they're getting really sick and really scared and don't know what to do.

And they end up, after seeing we tested this, we went back and looked at our numbers, the average amount of doctors that people see us before they get to our office guests. 14? Close. It was 15. 12 to 15 was the range. Yeah, me and Wendy looked at it. That's how many doctors people had to go through before they throw the tablet and are like, I'm going over here. We would have fallen right into that. So I am hoping by just with this and people understanding the mercury, the lead connection, especially if there's men out there, because I feel like it's funny with deeper healing.

I thought when I first came on board that we saw more women. And it's real, there's a lot more men that come to see us. I would say men too, yeah. And we've looked at the demographics. There are on paper, and I'm wondering if they're just the ones calling for their husbands. Well, that's mostly what I see. Or it'll be the sickest member of the family they'll start with. They'll like, well, this is happening with you right now. ship got better and now all of a sudden his wife's like, well, I want to get in here.

And that's what ends up happening. She didn't push me, but I'm like... What are you waiting for? Yeah. What do you wait on? She's been languishing doing her paperwork, you know? But even the... I've noticed our last dozen stay in heels that have come in, a lot of them come with a support person who's just there to help out. Then they come and they're like Wait a minute. Sign me up. I'm here for two weeks. And one of the main things they always want to get. is they wanna get a metals test. That should just be a prerequisite.

It's like you only need to do it one time. You just need know where you are. And then they make a plan and then you can see if you're clear. I mean, this isn't a test you gonna do a lot of times. So it's, I guess to wrap that up. Yeah, well I do wanna mention something about the testing because I think this is another thing that people are really confused. They're like, oh I did a heavy metal hair test or my doctor looked for heavy metals in my blood and I'm good, Whoa, whoa, let's clear the heavy metal talk up.

Heavy metals don't stay in your blood. So if a doctor did a heavy-metal test, get a new doctor, they will circulate in a recent exposure. They'll stay your system 24, 48, sometimes 72 hours, but then they'll deposit into your tissues. You will not be healthy, you will be well if you have very high levels in you blood, if In your blood, then you are having a recent exposure and you need to really reevaluate. Like, why would that be? And that's happened. We've caught that on people after they've been vaccinated or.

Um, we had one kid with lead that we. suspected it, cinnamon, got the blood test at the ER and it was high. So you can catch it. If you suspect a recent exposure, go get a blood. The hair, not so much. Not as accurate. Your body's secreting. the hair changes. It's only going to tell you if you've had probably about a two month exposure. Maybe three. You always want your total body bird. Yeah. What we do at Deeper Healing and I think I want everybody to realize if you're going to do it the right way and how functional medicine doctors are trained, environmental medicine doctor, you do what's called a pre-urine collection metals test, and then you actually have to take a key later.

We talked about that on the last episode. If you didn't listen to that, go back and watch that. It's actually a medication that we give that goes in and binds and claws the heavy metal. So it's going to attract, it like a magnet. It pulls it out of the tissues. That's where they're hiding. They're in our brain, they are in kidneys, there in bone, their in other organs. We have to go in an pull them out. If you just do a heavy metals urine test that you ordered online and you peed in the cup and sent it off and got it back and nothing was there, that still does not mean you don't have heavy medals.

You do pre to see what was their, without taking a key later. And then you take the key, later it gets in your system. Then you have to walk around with this big jug for six to eight hours and keep peeing in it to collect all your urine. You have mix it up evenly and then send it off to the lab to get it tested. That's how we go in and pull them out to see what is your body dumping.

How Heavy Metal Testing and Chelation Work 21:08

And that's how you find the hyla. And it's pulling it out of the tissues. That's what's there making you sick. So people don't really understand how all that. The IV is only about an hour and we'll do all of that in office. It's always fun to do it because the results are coming. I just did mine last week. They're really accurate too. Doing it that way, you'll get a really test with, you know, not only what you have, but where you're at with it, unless of course you are like Mercury Man over here.

I'm excited. So when was the last one that you had? Well, my original one was one I had. This will be your second? I turned my jug in on Friday. How long has it been? Four months. Okay, so sometimes and you tell me if you see this too, but It can go up sure and yeah, and people are like But you're like, this is a good time because you were like now you know, you have that first one that you did that's just a snapshot of what's in there that needs to come out. So then when you do it the second or third or fourth time, sometimes it can go up.

You're like, I'm feeling better, but more is coming out, so that's always a good sign. But I know some people are like no, there can't be more than there was at the beginning. I don't think it could be a bad result, right? Even if it goes down. Yay. Well, you want to see it coming down at some point, but it can be a couple urine tests. You're going through the steps to get rid of it. It depends how loaded you are. That's where it's very personalized. Like you never know, based on your history, what you said, how much you had at such a young age, I would expect it probably to be higher.

But you're still feeling better because you've mobilized it, and you moved it out, then it'll start to drop, which is awesome. Here's the reality, we're gonna still be exposed. to some of this stuff just in our daily life, you know? So that's where you're, You know what to do now, like, keep it, Keep it going. I mean, they know there's a problem. Look at the old, we live in an old town, Charleston, right? And so all of these historic homes, rack the paint off of every piece of the inside of, there's still lead in every house built before they took the volatile organic compound out of paint.

And we were born in the 70s with leaded gasoline everywhere. I mean, I was starting to go through like, well, where could I have gotten this lead? And then it was like lead a gasoline. They didn't change all the pipes when they said lead. No, those pipes are still sitting out there. I mean, I can look back and go, Oh yeah, now it makes sense. You know, just living, Just living in America. It's, it's quite, uh, It a little scary what all we're supposed to do. The good news is, you know we can be empowered when we figure it out and we clear it.

We're just like done, handled that. Yeah. I feel really good about it. Dry cleaning. Does anybody even know what that chemical is they use in dry cleaning? Oh, it's one of the most toxic ones out there. It's horrible, right? I should know the name of it, I can't remember off the top of my head. But I'm sure it has mercury and lead in it? It is everywhere. And every time we break something down, I mean you disturb paint in your house, you chip off paint, or you scrub something, your clean something.

You're disturbing it and releasing it. So it's usually on your hands and water or whatever you're cleaning with, are you've exposed it to the air. Then you ingesting it doesn't take much. It really doesn' take a lot. know, and your body says, Oh, I don't have enough of that. Let's just store. I dunno what to do with it, right? What am I going to with? That's why I stuck in it. So it doesn't know how to process it back out until we remove it." My father-in-law is Irish descent and he was in a small country schoolhouse growing up and they used to give the kids mercury to play with.

That was a little toy for them. We had it in lab and seeing how it balled up. And how I remember that when I was a kid. Did you? With a toothpick and how it would follow around? I just broke a thermometer by accident. I don't know if it was in a science lab, but I do remember playing with it when i was little. It was actually really cool. How much of that do you think you ingested or sucked up in your skin just touching it? You don' t? No. You go get a test and find out. Well, I've done mine. If any of my colleagues are out there, they'll remember this.

We in naturopathic medical school, we all had to do a pre and a post challenge. And it was our whole class. Like that's how we learned. We all have to it and we were all learning about heavy metals and I did it not even thinking two things about it. I'll never forget Dr. Anderson, one of my professors who's so awesome. Hi out there, Dr A. He pulled me up in his office before class, he's like, I need to see you before I need to show you your results because you are off the charts." And he had never seen anyone.

He's been teaching at the school for that long. be this high, like on the lab that came back. Like I was so high off the charts. I looked at your numbers and I higher than you. Oh, nice. We're in the same club, right? Yeah. And I, you know, I have no idea where I got it from. Was it my mom? Because now it makes like, yeah, it kind of feels like... But yeah. So I had to do a bunch of chelation while I in naturopathic school. Gosh. So was this before you had your girls? Yeah. Oh, yeah. This was when I was younger.

Because I went to naturopathic school right out of undergrad. Okay. I think I like 22, 23 when i found out that I had the really high mercury. But here's the thing, I have had ADD like my whole life. So, I mean, it wasn't that bad. Maybe some of my friends and some people would say. But in a good way, that's just the way my brain works. I'm very creative. It works a different way. Yeah. Spirit. Yeah, and loved naturopathic medical school, got through it, you know, passed. It was just more like, focus stuff.

I had to take a lot, drink lots of teas and take lots things for focus. And I knew certain foods that would throw me off like dairy. You start figuring things out when you get into naturopathic medicine. But anyway, the rounds I had to do, I think it was eight rounds of chelation and I did oral, um, IV and oral. So I would get one IV, and then I will do the whole, what is it? Um, three days on, seven days off, like do oral chalation. And I got my levels down pretty good. Then I didn't, you know, eat fish and anything.

I hadn't tested, think the last time I tested was like five years ago. We're gonna do it again. Let's compare our medals. We'll start a heavy metal club. That would be really interesting if you have like 30, you know... I have a lot of labs, yeah. You know, to see where it's at.

Aging, Dementia, and Hidden Toxic Burdens 28:38

I'm chelating right now myself. The one interesting thing, the thing that scares me that I remember learning from Dr. Crenian, as you get older, so these heavy metals, they hide in your tissues and your bones and certain metals have higher affinities for different ones. Like lead really likes the kidneys and the bone and mercury is like brain and kidneys and some others. If you go research it and you'll see these heavy metals, it's all about affinity. Where is it attracted? Where's it going to stick and stay?

Because every organ has a different frequency and it gets kind of complicated. But the biggest thing is a lot of them store in our brain. So as we get older, what happens as part of aging? we start getting osteoporosis, osteopenia, we're breaking down our bone minerals. So I think when we are younger, we're exposed to all these things. And like the body's just doing what it knows to do. It's right, it deposits, kind of hides it. Its there, its good. Yeah, we get exposed more and more stuff, but then like later in life, now it starts leaching back out.

You know, cause you look at lead and cardiovascular disease and all of these, and I mean, there's lots of studies and stuff out there. But the whole heavy metals and bone has always fascinated me with people aging. I am wondering and my theory is... I don't think I really ever connected that. My theory is this is part of the dementia thing. So with my mom, so this and I don't really have research. This is just me knowing what I know. But I think, you know, when she got 65, 70 and got her DEXA scan, she had osteopenia and then she started getting osteoporosis.

And that was the time her memory started to get worse and worse. And I knew she had had from before the really high mercury in the lead. And we just don't know, or maybe somebody out there does know and share your info because I really think there's something about all these heavy metals that are deposited in our bones. As we get older and they start breaking down, they get redeposited back out and I think they're affecting the brain. Couldn't agree more, couldn't degree more. So if you have any research out there on this stuff, that's my theory.

Like I said, I paid a million dollars to have one memory care facility, just check all the residents. I would love to see those pass. We could talk to somebody around here. Wouldn't that be wild? Yeah, it would be. Voluntary, but like we know people. It would so wild to say, wouldn't it be just I feel like they're all going to be off the charts. And you know what else I want to test them for? a urine culture. Half of those people in there that have dementia, my mom had this problem too. Sorry, you got pulled in, roped in.

That's very interesting. My mom, sorry. So my Mom had horrible, I mean, she started going downhill and she had a lot of health issues. I'm not going to get into all of it, but I can tell you one thing I learned and if anybody, if I could share this info with anybody out there, any time an older person starts to have major cognitive decline, go get a urine test. So a dipstick, that's one way, it's like a urine dip, but make and beg your doctor to do a culture. Like, if they don't do it, go to a different doctor, like run the culture, my mom, and I'm talking like, the cognitive decline along with really odd behavior and somewhat psychotic and delusional.

Like you're like, what is wrong with you? And I think this too, I mean, for kids as well, because we were talking about my daughter. She had a UTI once and I was like what's wrong this child and it was a But we went and tested it. The dip, they will not find it usually when they send it off in culture. And it happened. So I thought, I was like, oh, well, this is what's wrong with my mom. They put her on the antibiotic and all of a sudden she's like totally back to normal. It's so common and I didn't know this and until you go through it, you know you don't it but until have a loved one that like literally starts to go crazy and you can't figure it out and then you find out it's a UTI, it is very eye-opening but it has very common knowledge in these assisted living facilities and the memory care units, like I didn't realize this, but they're all like, oh yeah, such and such, they have a UTI.

Like all these people are getting UTIs that is affecting their cognitive behavior. And it's like half of the reason that they... It's a thing. Look it up, ask people if you know any people that are in assisted living or memory care or does anything with older people, they all get chronic UTIs and a lot of them become very psychotic, delusional and big personality changes. Wow. And it's all because of underlying infections, you know, along with possible heavy metals. I'm just kidding. Well, to close it up.

You haven't checked your heavy medals yet. What are you waiting for? Yeah. See you next time. Remember, this is educational content, not medical advice. The information shared here should be discussed with your own personal healthcare provider. If you're excited by listening to the medical experts or the personal recovery stories on here and you want to start your deeper healing journey, go to deeperhealing.com and start the process.