Medicine is baffled by Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and thus far, no matter how great the fanfare about amazing new breakthroughs, not one drug has managed to halt the slow but inevitable robbing of a person’s identity.
There’s a good reason for this. The fact is, conventional medicine has no idea what causes Alzheimer’s, and that’s because what we call ‘Alzheimer’s’ does not have a singular cause. The brain requires healthy levels of tubulin, a protein needed for the healthy formation of nerve tissue in the brain, and without adequate levels, messages in the brain don’t connect properly.
The label is used when doctors identify ‘neurofibrillary tangles’ and ‘senile plaques’ in the brain – thought to disrupt communication between neurons and interfere with proper brain function – but the reasons for the communication breakdown in the brain vary so widely that the end result is a collection of causes still looking for a tidy label. That label, up until now, has been AD.
AD isn’t really a ‘disease,’ more a symptom of slow-motion poisoning. Chief among causes is heavy metal poisoning, whether aluminum or mercury from amalgam fillings. As our cover story details (page 28), John Blackburn began showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s in his 50s. Luckily, he immediately suspected that the cause was the aluminum dust he’d been exposed to during his 20 years of working for a company that produced aluminum siding. Once he began a simple detox program, his health transformed.
Heavy metals act as a slow-motion poison on the brain, and increasing evidence points to aluminum. While John’s exposure was occupational, aluminum is present in our cookware, our deodorants and even our makeup.
The other major assault on the brain comes from the mercury present in amalgam fillings. This information is hardly revelatory, although conventional medicine refuses to acknowledge mercury as a potential cause. In the 1980s, a research team from the University of Kentucky investigating the connection between mercury and AD found high levels of the element in the brain tissue of AD victims. In fact, the highest trace element in the brains of a batch of autopsied AD patients was mercury. Other researchers have found that animals given mercury or aluminum develop a diminished tubulin level similar to people with AD.
At 80, Pat, for instance, began showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s. His wife, Melitta, suspected the problem was the 15 amalgam fillings in his mouth, and convinced him to undergo a test for amalgam poisoning, which revealed an extraordinarily high electrical current in his mouth.
Pat had the fillings removed in two sessions. Soon after his fillings were out, his doctor observed that Pat had suddenly ‘woken up.’ After five months of a detox program to get the amalgam out of his system, he was able to go out unassisted and handle matters such as letters and even the couple’s tax returns.
Systemic Candida overgrowth, allergies and food intolerances, pesticides, molds, nutritional deficiencies, drugs – the entire gambit of 20th-century toxic rubbish in our environment conspires to poison us in slow motion. The more susceptible among us may experience a scrambling up of the signaling in the brain and begin to evidence some of the symptoms that we have up until now called AD. Others of us will just get hay fever.
Naturopath Dr Harald Gaier has been interested in the role of certain viruses in acting as an initial trigger, particularly the herpes virus, chlamydia or spirochetes from tick bites. One formal letter signed by a group of prominent scientists cited 79 reports of infections causing the onset of AD. This notion of toxic overload or a viral trigger is akin to the viral (or vaccine) trigger that often seems to precipitate myalgic encephalomyelitis (see page 53).
Ironically, once John had identified the cause, he was able to embark on a surprisingly simple treatment: a cocktail of natural ingredients, plus water and exercise, was all that was needed in order to give him back his brain. No drugs, no heroic effort with lists of supplements. In fact, no medical intervention – just a simple morning smoothie.
Understanding the most puzzling illnesses like AD or even cancer requires that we dispose of our notion of illness as having any one cause or acting similarly in all of us.
Labeling diseases is ultimately limiting, forcing very different symptoms and individual causes into a very small box. What causes cancer in you is not what causes cancer in me, and my body’s individual symptom picture and response to it will ultimately be very different from yours.
In order to conquer AD, we first need to stop giving it a name. Once we do, we may stop looking for the single culprit – or cure.
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