Severe Psoriasis and Aluminum Overload — Kelly’s Mystery Finally Solved

The Deeper Healing Podcast
Kelly wore white gloves to hide her painful, bleeding psoriasis. Her personal story addresses aluminum exposure and skin healing at Deeper Healing Medical Wellness Center. Educational purposes only. Individual results vary.
ABOUT THE HOST, GUEST & PATIENT
Danielle Howley — Host, The Deeper Healing Podcast
Danielle Howley is the co-founder of Deeper Healing Medical Wellness Center and host of The Deeper Healing Podcast. She didn’t come from medicine — she came from desperation. When her husband Marty became gravely ill at 37 and spent a decade bedridden while doctors ran out of answers, Danielle refused to stop searching. That search led to a recovery his doctors had not expected — and it changed everything. She went on to co-found Deeper Healing in 2019, recruiting clinicians in environmental and integrative medicine to build the center she wished had existed when Marty was sick.
Today, the award-winning Deeper Healing Medical Wellness Center draws patients from around the world. A Canadian filmmaker created a documentary about their work — Body Burden: The Toxins We Carry — Featuring Deeper Healing. Every episode is built for the person who isn’t ready to give up.
Dr. Michael Bauerschmidt — Founder & Medical Director, Deeper Healing
Dr. Michael Bauerschmidt is a leading Environmental and Functional Medicine Physician and Founder of Deeper Healing Medical Wellness Center in Charleston, South Carolina. He stands at the forefront of physicians who refuse to accept there is nothing more that can be done. After his own health crisis pushed him beyond the limits of conventional medicine, he trained in environmental medicine and has since helped hundreds of patients uncover the hidden root causes behind their chronic illness — including mold exposure, toxin overload, heavy metal burden, and immune dysfunction. In this episode, he breaks down the science behind environmental exposures and autoimmune responses through the lens of Kelly’s clinical case.
Kelly — Patient, Deeper Healing Medical Wellness Center
Kelly struggled with severe skin sensitivities since childhood, which eventually progressed into debilitating eczema on her hands. The condition became so severe that she wore white gloves daily because the skin on her hands would crack and bleed. After conventional treatments including steroid creams failed to produce lasting improvement, Kelly pursued a functional medicine evaluation at Deeper Healing. The team explored possible environmental contributors to her symptoms — including her childhood proximity to an aluminum factory — and built a protocol addressing her body burden of metals, molds, and chemicals. Kelly reports significant skin improvement and that her severe hand eczema has resolved. No compensation was provided in exchange for sharing her story. Her experience is one person’s account and is not a representation of typical outcomes.
1:08 Introduction — Kelly’s high aluminum levels and her story
2:16 Dr. B explains aluminum’s estimated 50-year half-life and bone storage
4:32 Immunosuppressants and why suppressing the immune system doesn’t address root cause
6:43 The mistaken identity theory of autoimmune disease — molecular mimicry and rheumatic fever
8:39 The arsonist vs. fire analogy explained
10:55 Superfund sites, historical environmental exposure, and water contamination
12:44 The body burden quiz and discussion of immune system burden
14:39 Closing discussion — the clinical definition of toxicity and what it means for patients
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– Learn more at DeeperHealing.com: https://deeperhealing.com/
– Wondering about your own body burden? Take the free quiz: https://go.deeperhealing.com/body-burden-assessment
– Support patients in need: The Deeper Healing Foundation: https://deeperhealing.com/foundation/
– Watch the documentary: Body Burden: The Toxins We Carry — Featuring Deeper Healing: https://theemfguy.com/op/body-burden-ev/?oprid=96512&ref=242734
– Free MD Guidebook: A Guide to Living Well in Toxic Times: https://go.deeperhealing.com/live-well-in-toxic-times
– Mold Recovery Course: https://go.deeperhealing.com/mold-recovery-course
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Full Transcript
Kellyu2019s Recovery Story 0:00
Kelly is having a remarkable recovery from things that were told to be incurable. When her hands started drying up, I was just thrilled beyond words. She first came in, she had white gloves on that we're soaking through with with blood. You can see the pain on her face just to move her hand. Oh my gosh. So it's just been it has been remarkable. But she was a case of that was the fire and we were able to kind of quench the Welcome to the Deeper Healing Podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Howley. 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're gonna 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. Hi, everybody. Okay, I'm here today with Kelly. I love her. Kelly's got literally the craziest story. And I am like, we got to put this out there. So and we can kind of just do an interview style.
But one of the things that is wild about Kelly story is she had no idea what this deep dive of deeper healing is going to uncover and it uncovered it about her mom. her brother, her entire town she grew up in. So how did you first find deeper healing? I had been experiencing extreme exhaustion and brain fog. Okay. To the point where like my children would say something to me and they would just fall and I couldn't process it. And I'm like, you know, putting the keys in the fridge and this kind of stuff.
My husband's first making fun of me. something's wrong. You're way too young. Way too. Too young for that. For that and just, you know, two, three in the afternoon, I'm done for the day type of exhaustion. And a friend of mine had come here, had excellent results.
Symptoms and the Deeper Dive 2:00
So you're like, i want to do the deep dive and see what's going on. It's a blood panel, probably a mycotoxin test, and then the metals test. I did this, did the medals recently. so I've been coming here for over a year and I had held off on this. Cash has chased out some other things because I have developed this horrific and supposedly incurable case of psoriasis on the hands where my hands were torn open and blistering and bleeding for like a year. And so we were chasing that down and some other stuff and Dr.
B had me doing. I did cleanses and I It's funny, every night I literally watch the psoriasis commercial. The drug commercials focus psoriasis like on repeat every day. And it's like side effect death. I'm like, what the heck? I just wanted my steam cleared up. My daughter watches them. She knows what I went through. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm glad that cleared up. So it's interesting too, that you like kind of wait to do the metals testing. Cause a lot of people do this though. Like I just want to one thing at a time.
And then some people are like, give me it all. I like I am doing that with my son right now. He's getting all his testing done and it is going to be the big reveal. Yeah, well that's smart because here we are. Can I get this metals test done? And Dr. B looks at me and he goes, you have the highest aluminum I've ever seen. And I'm like, what? So Kelly tells me that I sound like cocaine. Whoa, I know he's seen some high Illumina. What's going on with you? I am thinking it's gonna be lead from some things in my childhood that would have made me think, well, obviously I have lead toxicity.
I don't drink pop out of cans. We have reverse osmosis water. And so this is wild how she connects it out. So her Illuminums off the charts. He's like, where did you grow up? Okay. This is where like head explode. Okay, so I grew up in Westchester, Illinois. And as it turns out, someone else hears from that area and says to me, did, you know that the Reynolds Aluminum plant was like a couple miles from our house in the eighties? No, I did not. But let's chase that down, shall we? So the largest aluminum foil.
One of the top 10 in the country. Manufacturing it. Yes. So, the excess waste from the manufacturer basically went into all the water weights. Yeah, so this plant's a half mile from The Dislames River. And apparently at its peak in the eighties. So like y'all, any of you Gen X kids who drank out of the garden hose, guess what we were drinking? Didn't know it. My dad grew the tomatoes in a backyard. All that, all that plume under the houses. I did some research on this because I couldn't believe it, it was like a 3.2 million square foot facility.
It said every time it rained, like 300 pounds of aluminum and 50 pounds, I think, of chromium, zinc and copper getting dumped into the waterways, into river. The dust coming off of it into your breathing it Drinking it out of your hoses. If you had well water drinking it, out at the well, water. I mean, how many, many millions of people do you think in Illinois have been affected by that?
Aluminum Exposure in Westchester 5:00
I can't even count. Like this is, is that I'm trying to take that in. Okay. And then there's like the down river. Well, where else did it go? Right. It's done half into the slains river and, and the soil is impacted by it. Because apparently in the early two thousands, the EPA went in and took like a hundred thousand cubic yards of affected soil out. So that's how they know some of the figures, but this is what? 20 plus years later. Yeah. And now everyone's just living. Now everyone is just like living and like they're never, I would have never known this.
I know for a fact, my brother doesn't know this, so tell me. Okay. So now you're going backwards and connecting docs with your mom and you. And even just growing up as a kid, like I was always a rashy kid. My mom's like, oh, I had to wash your hair over the sink because shampoo would make your back break out in a rush. I told Dr. B, well, haven't been able to wear a traditional deodorant since I, was like 20, because it would making me breakout in the rash. It was, Oh, that's cause you're sensitized to aluminum.
And I have always been and didn't know. He goes, I don't how this went away with that aluminum in your body. Yeah, that's wild. So it's just getting your load down a little bit. And then retraining the immune system with LDA was enough to calm that down. But thank God you didn' say, oh I heal. Like I still want to check this too. Thank you. Well, because all of my symptoms aren't gone and I'm making progress, but I am still struggling with the addings. And he's looking at, he is diving into everything.
He is looking into some other panels and going, all right, we're getting this under control. Why is this here? Why does this? And then we're looking at this and he's like, oh, your immune system's been on fire. Probably for your whole life. And I've had autoimmune issues for my entire life, and if you weren't digging in the way you're digging here, if were at a different practice, it would be a lot of diet and supplements and pushing back on you. Not getting to... And giving you IV immunosuppressants.
I mean, that's the number one, this I was told incurable, just put steroids on it. And the steroids made it worse. The steroids mean blisters of all my fingers. So painful. I'd be on immunosuppressants and sick all the time. We know how many people, if the commercials are running nonstop every night, we know that this is millions of people. And it's heartbreaking because I see the moms all time, my child has eczema. My child's suffering from that. It's like the steroid creams and the bleach baths and all this stuff that they have the kids do.
How many How many people are little kids like me who were just, well, you're a rashy kid. Yeah, I just always thought, that's just the way you are. Now you've been reviewing everything from your childhood. Tell me about your mom. What happened to your Mom? So my mom, my parents bought this house in like the late seventies. I was born in 79. My brother was were in 85. And somewhere after my brother was born, my mother developed a loraphobia and panic disorder. She used to be a nurse. she quit working, has never gone back to work.
I mean, people, that happens to me, she never, never crossed. She was not on the list. And to this day, I means she, She's in her seventies now. she's been on Benzos for 48 years and she is getting dementia. and She is mad. It's from that. I hate that I'm losing my mind and I know it's for these drugs. I'm so sorry. It's mind blowing to think of the downstream of all this stuff that's all connected and you can grow up there your whole life and never connect the dots. This is such an important story because I can tell you like even where I grew up, they dumped all the asbestos in the whole northern region.
They dug a hole and they put all these as best as in a whole and covered it with water and put a chain link fence around it. And that was just in Pennsylvania. So these things, I mean, that is a designated superfund site.
Family History and Childhood Sensitivities 9:00
I don't even know if yours is even designated. The mirrors is just like, Oh, it's gone now and everything's cool. What happened to your brother? Cause you now you're like wait a minute. suffered from a lot of things too. And he's 40 and he can't work. He has a lots of anxiety and issues like that as well. This has the direct effect on your brain. So I mean, it makes sense. You need to check smells. It's the first thing I thought of was, oh my gosh, my brother has to do this. Yeah. I'm saying this to my brothers and sisters too, like my lead is so high and I now have definitely traced it back to childhood because my daughter, I had when I was 30 already has the levels that I have.
So I'm like, okay, this is like 30 and under was when this happened. Now I am going back to my four siblings. Hey guys, you've got to check your mountain. This is such a giant, giant thing. If you are in your midlife and you're having any of the things, can't think of a word. I've tired all the time. I have these skin conditions. All these rashes. You know, they said also, um, fragile bones, broken bones all the time. I didn't have broken bonds. My med acid in other ways, but all of these symptoms that you just wouldn't place on aluminum that's in your water runoff and your soil.
It's so breezy. And I just kept thinking, all jokes, the GenXers were always joking about the garden houses. I know. And my kids don't believe it. I'm like, no, seriously, in the summer, you just went to the side of the host, drank the water, and you moved on with your day. All right, guys. So this is just a really important story for anybody out there who's suffering from a lot of weird stuff. It may be environmental toxins from where you grow up. Anybody who grew up in Illinois, have a look at Westchester.
Have a looks at the Reynolds factory. Yeah. You need to get your metals checked. but this is something very important to people who live there or who have lived there. Absolutely. So, all right. Thanks guys. Hi everybody. Okay. We just heard from Kelly, her like incredible aluminum poisoning story. And it's like, where do we even go? There's literally like 10 directions you can go with that. Really, really there's, Kelly was very interesting. She was literally the highest aluminum level I'd ever seen.
I've seen a lot of aluminum levels. And aluminum is particularly interesting because it's so pervasive in our society. Cans, you know, containers. It's literally been using a Reynolds wrap since I was a little kid. Well, it is funny. We all talk about the cooking in the aluminum or the drinking from cans, but we never think about Wrapping your food in aluminum. Well, no, you never think about growing up next to a factory that's been closed for 20 years. That's not something I would even like. What?
Well and these chemicals don't just magically disappear when the factory closes. They're still there. Yeah, they kind of just like did a little scooping off the topsoil in that area. And it takes a lot more than that to get rid of, you know, a decade's worth of production. You know Kelly was interesting on several levels. One is early on she was showing those signs of sensitivity, having been sensitized with aluminum. So you use a deodorant, she'd get a rash. She was a rashy kid. A lot of aluminum is also so pervasive in our society, it's easy to come in contact with it.
And then she mentioned her mother with the Alzheimer's in medical school. They talked to us about aluminum being a cause for Alzheimer, dementia specifically, and aluminum will cross the blood brain barrier. Aluminum has literally some of the same chemical components or some the chemical pathways as iron in our body. Most aluminum is stored in bone. And this is why even though Kelly's exposure had been as a child, the half-life of aluminum in the body is considered to be somewhere in an area of 50 years.
Why Autoimmunity Needs a Root Cause 13:00
Okay. So she wasn't 60 years old yet. So stuff she was exposed at 10, she hadn't even gotten rid of half of. Most of the aluminum, 60% of aluminum you accumulate is held in your bone. Well, your bones turns over at about 10% a year, so you're constantly re-releasing aluminum back into your system, reemphasizing that sensitivity and re emphasizing the possibility of eventually on top of everything else that you are exposed to in the chemical world. beyond metals. I mean, we now have 7.1 trillion pounds of chemicals being made a year, up from 1.2 million in the 60s.
We've got indoor air pollution, off gassings. It's always the body burden. The brilliant name of the movie about deeper healing, Body Burden. At some point, the manifestations are there and they're persistent. That whole idea, oh, let's suppress the immune system. Oh God, we gotta talk about that. That makes my head go on fire. Every night, I know y'all are watching those commercials every night which is like, this is the best. You're sick, you have psoriasis and it's showing the sores. And they're literally running on the beach on a happy day.
It's like, well, here's your immunosuppressant. We'll destroy your ability to take care of yourself. Then here are all the side effects, side effect death. Like literally the site effects are horrible. But those commercials are running nonstop. So I'm like we must have an epidemic of eczema and psoriasis because every other commercial is about the skin conditions every night. Well, you know, skin has a fairly rapid turnover. So we're replacing it on a really regular basis. Certainly changes in our physiology, changes and the reproducibility of our organs, which is ongoing, is one of the manifestations would be skin.
A lot of this, eczema psoriasis is considered autoimmune, Which is why they put you on immunosuppressants. It doesn't make sense to me. You want to know why your immune system isn't working. And here you kind of go back to the deep. Well, and I always go on being a non-medical person, but just common-sensical. Like even when they tried to do this to Marty, when he was sick, I just kept saying like, But how is that the path out? How is it the to getting better? And that's the question I'm always asking, even as just a lay person.
Is suppressing my immune system for a long period of time, is going to make me well? It doesn't make sense. Well, no, it doesn, and you're absolutely right. And that's the questions we should be asking as physicians and healers is why, why and as patients. Yeah. I mean, you have a responsibility for your own health. You know, the. The problem is where you're going to find help is the training is not such that we're taught to look for reasons, we are taught find solutions. And so the solution is if you have an autoimmune disease, you want to suppress the immune system because it's always the short-term gate.
Let's stop, let's make you comfortable now and we'll worry about the other stuff later. I remember when Marty, they said, you have a mystery autoimmune condition and here's your list of the drugs you're going to take. I remembered saying, but you don't know what it is. That was another thing that I couldn't wrap my head around was like, the mystery part was, And it was like, yeah, we don't need to know that, you know, it doesn't matter. And I just said, just never sat well. But let's go back to the skin thing, because like you say all the time, You're seeing loads of children coming in.
So here this her story started as a child. And here it is, now she's getting into her midlife and it's, getting worse and worse, and she is being told it isn't curable, horrible side effects from the things they are recommending. So she ends up coming like, does this deeper healing place have something different to offer? No one ever thought about metal toxins as anything to do with a skin condition. People don't think about toxicity in general. At all. But nickel, nickel sensitivity is well known and well recognized people.
Oh, I can't wear jewelry because I could only wear gold or 18 karat or 21 karats gold, or I only do sterling silver because the nickel is mixed in all these things. And people just take that, oh, it's just nickel sensitive. You just don't where nickel. So for, so you're out there, you are hearing this. You're like, wait a minute, I have horrible psoriasis. I like what should I do? So you would say, check your toxins, like find out your thing. And also, a lot of eczema, psoriasis is, well, let's go back for just a second is what is autoimmunity?
Environmental Toxins and Superfund Sites 18:00
Is your body really attacking itself? And that doesn't make sense. It's because it's a mistaken identity. When your body reacts to something, it's reacting to a protein sequence in that thing. Well, you know, people have heard about rheumatic fever at some point. I mean, used to be very common, before they came up with penicillin for strep throat. It's involved with the body attacking the valves in the heart. While the party isn't really attacking your valves as a result of having an infection. The problem is the body has, in its attempt to control the infection by attacking the strep germ that caused it, it attacked a certain protein sequence in that germ.
It's not attacking a whole beta strept germ, is attacking protein a sequence that in you happens to also look like your heart valve. So your body's going, oh, there's a streb germ! So it's a mistaken identity thing. Okay. So you got two issues here. We got to figure out why is your system flaring up to begin with. And then you're talking about is it food sensitivities, is something in food, particularly in kids, X-Men kids. I can almost guarantee you, you've got a leaky gut and you are reacting to foods.
Or you're born with high toxins. Or born high toxin. From your parents. I was thinking that because I look at my own kids. You know, I had one with horrible eczema and the pediatrician's always like, put the stirring creams on, you know? And it was like back right afterwards. And I'm like this isn't a way out. Yeah. But look, look look. Look at the rash or the ectomas, rices, hives. What? Look, at that as the fire. As a signal. Well, you can put out the fire with antihistamines or steroid creams or immunosuppressants, but who's the arsonist?
Okay. Like it. If you don't find the Arsonists, he's just going to go light a fire someplace else. Right. Okay So, you know, it's all about finding who's got the matches. Okay, and let's get that. Get the match out of his hand. Then worry about the fire. Do you think it is useful for people? Okay. So like one of the first things I did after hearing this story was like, I got to look up where I grew up. Did we have a factory down the street? And I, You know I grow up in Pennsylvania. I group in a very urban Philly environment, Philadelphia and have high lead and a lot of toxins I'm sure.
Yeah, there is a thing about that. And, you know, but I think all these big urban cities, like high population. There's Last Count somewhere in the vicinity of 1,343 superfund sites across the country. So is it worthwhile to look that up? So I did a little Google search, where are all the Superfund sites in the United States? And there's a map and it comes up and you can see, and then there are the dots and your like, oh, I grew up here. Okay, let me look at those. So when you click on it, it literally will show you, Oh, asbestos, whatever the culprit was.
And you could look, there was a naval air base that had a big thing that ran into the water and they had to go clean it up. That's what they're doing with the naval base. air bases are doing fire drills all the time. That's what it was. It was the foams. The chemicals in the foam and a lot of those chemicals have the forever chemicals. And they were in water. PFOA, PFOS, it's just all those guys, the PFASs are in a water supply now. So, I mean, that's something like free that anybody could do. It's like, look up, like where did I grow up?
Where are those superfund sites? But I, mean that, just one little part of the story. And it doesn't have to be a huge super fund site. There was a case back when I was learning environmental medicine that Dr. Crinion had mentioned and it was, a person had high level of carbon tetrachloride. which is no longer used, it was common in dry cleaners. And it turned out the carbon tetrachloride was in their well water. They said, well, how did that get in wellwater? Well, they look back and a mile down the road, 10 years before they bought this house or put their, sunk their weld, there was a dry cleaner's there.
Healing the Body and Closing Thoughts 22:00
Oh my gosh. So it doesn't have to be a super fun site in order to have a contaminated environment. So then really the most efficient way to figure it out is to test yourself. Exactly. Like really that's because it doesn't matter. We're all living in the world and you can't possibly know. There was an old dry cleaner down the street before I was born, like Kelly's story. This factory had been closed before she was even born. But also it's pummeled her family's health. And then when we were off there, Kelly and I were like, how many people from that area are dealing with memory care, memory loss, all the things, you know?
You screw with your immune system and you're dealing with the body's ability to manage everything from the common cold to cancer. Yeah. It's just your system, to me, is really the ultimate. I mean, it's what you need in order to heal. That's you what need to grow and protect. beat off the bad boys and reinforce the good guys. So one thing our listeners can do is learn that psoriasis and eczema is a bigger story. That's like number one, it's a big story, the second thing you can go is you go on the deeperhealing.com website and there's free toxin quiz.
It's bunch of questions that'll ask you that will give you an assessment for free where you are, highest things to look at in your life. And if you end up having like a high score like, oh shoot, I got some issues, You can get environmental testing, you know, and see where you are and heal yourself, get yourself better. How do I reverse? You know Kelly is having a remarkable recovery from things that were told to be incurable. Her hands started drying up. I was. just thrilled me out of words. She, she first came in and she'd had white gloves on that were soaking through with, with blood and stain.
It was just, you could see the pain on her face just to, to move her hands. Oh my gosh. So it's just been, it has been remarkable, but she was a case of that was the fire. And we were able to kind of squelch the fires while we're getting rid of the arsonists simultaneously. which is possible. I mean, you don't always have to arrest the arsonist first and then put out the fire. You can work on them both simultaneously, but you got to work out of both. She was literally in gloves with bloody hands.
So this is like a completely life changing, priceless change for her life. Yeah. When she said eczema, I just thought what I normally see, like just like the dryness is really severe. I'm going to ask her for some pictures to pop them in here. But anyway, okay. So wrapping up, amazing story, incredible science. And as Dr. B says all the time, these are the rocks that no one's looking under. No one's looking under the rocks of toxins that have plummeted your health and manifesting in a wide variety of ways.
No-one ever would have connected a skin condition on the hands to aluminum toxicity from childhood. That's a very big gap. Aluminum exposure. We have to be careful how we use the word toxin. The government gets really fussy about that. Oh, okay. Do tell. I don't know what the difference is. Well, toxicity implies an acute change, generally, life or limb threatening. This seemed a little life and limb-threatening. Limb, actually, potentially, because it gets infected. Her skin barrier was severely compromised, and so repeated infections are not uncommon in that situation.
You get the wrong bug in there with an impaired immune system to begin with, yeah, it could be. But it can't link that directly to the effect of only the aluminum. Okay. So as she cleansed and as dealt with her metal exposures, molds, metals, chemicals, her skin and her body on the cellular level healed. And that is basically what deeper healing does. In a nutshell. All right, we're gonna end on that. And for anybody out there who has a lot of passion for helping people at deeper healing who cannot afford treatments, check out the link for the deeper Healing Foundation.
The link below for The Toxin Quiz, take the quiz and figure out what's going on with you for free and we'll help you stay clean. Okay, stay well everybody. We hope this episode inspired you. Here's how to go deeper. Visit deeperhealing.com to become a patient. Online, we have loads of courses and a free toxin quiz. Subscribe and please, please share this episode with someone who needs it. It's always that one-on-one support that really gets people to find deeper healing. 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.
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