April 21, 2001

Dear Chelation Physician or Interested Health Professional

I am extremely concerned that a valuable therapy, chelation therapy, to which I have devoted over 30 years of my life will soon become entirely discredited unless we make some major changes. IV EDTA has become excessively identified with the treatment of cardiovascular disease and patients assume because they feel so much better that they now have clean or at least vastly improved arteries. This we have not been able to prove with existing technology and clearly it does not routinely eliminate arteriosclerosis.  The Cardiologists are too big for us to take on, and we must reposition ourselves as experts eliminating and/or rebalancing minerals in the body, eliminating or binding toxic metals and replenishing essential minerals to restore metabolic balance to the body.

It seems that we must distance ourselves as far as possible from the clearly incorrect roto-rooter image. One way might be to reposition ourselves as the biological detoxification experts, so that we can safely and legitimately offer our valuable services to patients with cirrhosis, asthma, autism, cancer and every other degenerative disease where removal of toxic metals, accompanied with replenishment of essential minerals, can have salutary effect on the lives of millions of people.  I will be making a presentation in October in Boston to over 2000 attendees that are the chiefs of the managed care industry.

I hope to have some wide spread discussion before that, and maybe some input from every chelation physician.  So I have set up a special internet site for all interested parties to openly discuss, just among ourselves, the ideas that I will put forth here and your responses to my ideas.  We need to determine where chelation therapy is going. I only need for you to supply me with your e-mail address so that I can add you to the Yahoo site.

We must soon acknowledge that IV EDTA, although a nearly miraculous treatment, should never be used as a stand-alone therapy for anything except detoxification. If you have heart disease, you must also have all of your other risk factors thoroughly addressed.  We must accept the fact that we do not have the money to neutralize all of the negative studies that continue to come out.  We cannot prevent those who study chelation from choosing end-points or designing studies which fail to show benefit.  When I was President of AAMP/ACAM, I stuck carefully to the language in the PDR, namely that EDTA was possibly effective in occlusive vascular disease. Today, it seems that we have fallen into saying that it is bypass or chelation therapy. That is a position I believe from which we must distance ourselves for the good of the patients, the doctors, and the future of the chelation movement. We must accept that although we improve functioning in cardiovascular disease and a whole host of other diseases, we are still unable to explain exactly what is going on.  Although the thermographs and Doppler’s and Treadmill EEGs on our patients look improved, the arteriograms, ultra-high speed CAT studies for calcium in coronary arteries, and the autopsies tell us there is still a lot of arteriosclerosis out there. We need to think about proving that mitochondrial function is improving and that we are increasing levels of ATP, etc. We need to carefully change what we tell the patients they are receiving and upgrade our informed consent procedures. If someone dies, we must understand that the courts will take the position that the negative studies that are published should have been made known to the patients. We have not been able to adequately document the effectiveness of chelation therapy for cardiovascular disease by the measurements accepted by those who oppose chelation therapy.  Our opponents will be there in droves to testify against us when there is an important death, which will of course happen, so what is said to every patient receiving chelation therapy, and preferably that all-important discussion, when the patient is deciding to undergo chelation therapy, which is when the real informed consent occurs, should be recorded and given to the patient. I believe that this improved informed consent process is vital to the future survival of our movement.

Now, with the existence of the ultra high speed CAT scan, I feel the momentum is building on the part of our opposition to thoroughly discredit chelation therapy once and for all.  I think it is incumbent on those of us who are proponents of chelation therapy to have a web-based discussion group where we hear from everyone.  I have invited everyone to supply me with their e-mail address if they would like to participate, and hopefully soon either GLCCM (now ICIM) or ACAM will want to open up such a site, although since I have a lot of criticism of our current chelation organization that I believe needs to be heard, few will have the courage to want to associate with several things that I will be saying in this letter, and in the weeks to come there will be those that want my view point stifled.

The last time everyone was invited into the discussion was over 25 years ago, when I wrote the initial protocol that became adopted worldwide.  At that time, I asked for the participation of every interested chelation physician in the world.  I welcomed all to come to a weekend meeting and state their ideas, which were recorded.  I took all of those ideas and worked on them for the next six months and reduced it to what became the basic initial protocol for chelation therapy.

Now, unfortunately, with the tremendous interest in arteriosclerosis, we have become overly identified with this market where our competition utilizes tests like the ultra high speed CAT and arteriogram.  Over the years we must accept the fact that we do not have any study that shows that we reproducibly, routinely reverse arteriosclerosis in our patients.  Yet, most of our patients assume that is why they are spending their money and since they generally feel so much better, they do not question that overly simplistic concept.  Our opponents will put this fact in a very unfavorable light, whenever someone dies, or they are trying to ban the therapy.

Nonetheless, we offer a tremendous service and benefit to our patients; but we need to have a better method of explaining the exact service that we provide so that we can avoid any potential for charges of fraud and malpractice.  If we reposition ourselves as a major part of biological detoxification, we open up the potential of treating virtually every man, woman and child.  I say this because I am convinced, and many of the references that totally support what I am saying appear in my article in the ACAM journal, Clinical Practice of Alternative Medicine, Vol 2, No 1, Spring 2001, that we all have an excessive burden of toxic heavy metals that is preventing our enzymatic systems from operating at their peak efficiency.

I hope that by using the collective wisdom of the courageous doctors who have utilized chelation therapy against all opposition all of these years that we might come to recognize some way to reposition ourselves and come to discover and then routinely employ some tests that would indicate improved functioning of enzyme systems, or reduction in overall free radical burden in the body. We need to move chelation into the age of molecular medicine and discover some way of documenting what we are doing. This would permit us to hold our heads high, and grow, as we should, while we continue to provide a beneficial service to mankind.

There are many other controversies within this general problem and we must also extend this discussion to the benefit and risks of oral versus intravenous chelation, because the leader of the attack against oral EDTA, Dr. Elmer Cranton, states on pages 56-58, of the current ACAM journal, that there is no justification whatsoever for parentally administered chelating agents if you are merely treating mercury overload. So clearly in some circumstances he favors oral chelation.  He feels oral EDTA is far too dangerous to regularly consume, although you can take it intravenously as often as you like.  Therefore, clearly in some cases he is against the use of parenteral administration of chelation therapy and then favors oral chelation.  On page 27, he points out that EDTA has its only known effect on metallic ions, i.e., binding, redistributing and removing them.  He feels that this redistribution can enhance the activity of metal-containing enzymes. I of course strongly disagree with his restricting the benefits of EDTA to just IV use, since every weak organic acid is a useful chelator, and I use lots of Malic acid (as an Iron and aluminum) chelator, and lots of ascorbic acid.  It seems strange that vinegar (acetic acid) alone, of all these weak organic acids is too dangerous to take orally or rectally! I believe that he clearly is in an unsupportable position and I feel the only way to end this nonsense is to have a debate with him; at this moment he is declining to do this. Any chelation doctors is subject to a conflict of interest and many will assume that greed is the driving force when someone doing IV chelation tells their patients that oral chelation is dangerous. Yet I have just received e-mail from someone on my oral chelation program that I had advised to also take IV chelation. The patient saw an ACAM doctor who has informed her that my oral EDTA will be dangerous to her liver, but the IV she gives safely goes out the kidneys!  In my estimation such total misinformation from a licensed physician is grounds for discipline. Such total distortion of the facts has gone on so long at ACAM, that it has become institutionalized. 

I have the opportunity to do a national television show that will substantially raise consciousness about the pollution of heavy metals and the need for biological detoxification. I would like to feel that I could refer everyone watching the show to knowledgeable chelation physicians, since I believe that everyone will function better, and live longer if we lower their overall burden of toxic metals routinely throughout life with some oral chelation.  Aided where needed with the anti-aging and other benefits we need to justify of the use of IV EDTA. 

I would like to think that ACAM physicians could clean up their act on their own without my having to bring ethics charges, or accusations of incompetence against ACAM doctors for deceiving people who choose to take oral EDTA by stating such total nonsense.  I, of course, will happily debate Dr. Cranton’s wild allegations in a recent e-mail to me, that maybe my patients will develop bowel cancer or become seriously malnourished. He knows this is utter unsupportable nonsense.  He has just now finished a new book on chelation so he should know what he could support from the literature. He knows there is nothing to support cancer in humans from oral EDTA.

Unknown to most chelation physicians, Dr. Cranton first designed and sold an oral chelation product containing EDTA when I had popularized EDTA in a product, which I had co-developed with the Arteriosclerosis Research Institute under Dr. L Morrison.  My product was proven in laboratory tests to inhibit clot formation. Dr. Cranton wrote a letter to every ACAM doctor saying that he could bring them the same product we were selling at a far lower price.  Of course, he was able to do that by ignoring the patents that the Institute had spent over $10 million in developing the basic formula to prevent heart attacks that I still sell today, as Garlic Plus and Beyond Chelation.  Of course, since he was not paying the royalties to the Institute he could do it cheaper. Of course, there is a real question in my mind as to whether Dr. Cranton really knew everything that the Institute knew about the complexities in formulating this anti-thrombotic material, that had been shown in studies to prevent over 91% of heart attacks compared to age and sex matched controls, or would the patients on his look alike product, that looked similar on the label, have the same low death rate that Dr. Morrison had documented that the patients on the original Institute formula were enjoying. Dr. Cranton had significant ownership in AMNI for many years while it was selling and continues even now to sell oral EDTA products, although AMNI is now owned by Douglas Labs.  AMNI and other companies at ACAM routinely have sold and still sell oral EDTA containing products.   Dr. Cranton, as Editor of the Journal for the American Holistic Medical Association asked me to write an article for that journal in favor of oral EDTA, while he owned AMNI and was selling oral EDTA. Now that he no longer enjoys any revenue from the sale of oral EDTA, he seems to prefer the IV form, from which he apparently still enjoys revenue.

Nonetheless, I believe that Dr. Cranton would be the most productive person for me to debate, although he has stated recently that he is getting to old to debate me and has declined my invitation to debate, but he has been in the field of chelation therapy for a long time and a debate between us would be very useful for the ACAM membership to listen to. It might mean the end of the misinformation about oral EDTA that I have had to hear for several years now, after all I can show that I provided ACAM with all of the documentation about oral EDTA and they refused to make it available to the membership!

Dr. Cranton points out in his useful articles in the current ACAM journal that the chelation doctors have not adequately appreciated the importance of the paper published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in 1999, Volume 33, p1578 by Frustaci, et al, entitled “Marked elevation of myocardial trace elements in . . . cardiomyopathy.”  His “more comprehensive, scientific rationale for the use of EDTA chelation therapy” article on page 26 focuses on this augmentation of vital metalloenzymes and admits that this might even be more important than the reduction in free radical reactions. I believe that these new concepts largely destroy his excuses for attacking the use of oral EDTA. Oral EDTA can be continuously ingested, affordably, over a lifetime since it is not much more expensive that Vitamin C and is sold in this country by the railroad tank car, to be added to our food supply.

If we should all agree with this enzyme activation concept as one possible explanation for the mechanism of action of EDTA as briefly mentioned in Dr. Cranton’s article and considerably amplified in my article in this month’s ACAM journal, then we would have a rational explanation for offering chelation therapy to every patient. This would be better than implying to our patients that our therapy is reversing arteriosclerosis.  

That change in our explanation for why we chelate people might make it even more clear then, that when we treat a patient for cardiovascular disease, competent medical care demands that we concurrently treat every known risk factor for that patients’ cardiovascular disease, not just drip in some IV EDTA.  Every chelation physician should be in charge of risk factor identification and management for the optimal protection of the patient, so that there are no incompatibilities in therapies.    

Once we all begin freely admitting to our patients that chelation therapy is clearly not a specific therapy for the treatment of arteriosclerosis, I believe that the political climate will change and ACAM and GLCCM can grow more rapidly and have greater credibility in setting standards for metal binding in medicine to be used in virtually every disease. 

Thus, our patients would no longer expect reversal of high-grade obstructions on angiogram and would no longer look at intravenous chelation, or oral chelation for that matter, as a magic bullet. They would see chelation in any form as only a step toward improving enzyme function by either lowering the level of toxic metals or, as Dr. Cranton theorizes, redistributing essential trace elements more uniformly throughout body tissues.

If we, as the chelation proponents, back away from our excessive identification with reversing cardiovascular disease, I believe that every competent chelation doctor could reasonably expect to double his business because there are so many toxic people that no one is helping today.  I was also a co-founder of ABCT and I believe we must expect its diplomats to be competent in dealing with many different chelators and able to deal cost effectively with various forms of toxic metal overload. 

There are millions of patients whose medical problems respond poorly if at all to standard medical therapies, but whose cirrhosis, autism, hyperactivity, arthritis, or cancer will become responsive when enzyme functions are improved as a result of chelation therapy.  This should finally eliminate the picture of patients thinking that it is a choice between chelation therapy or bypass, and might actually lead to the far more defensible conclusion that chelation therapy might make some patients well enough to survive bypass surgery, if that is what you choose to do, perhaps without dying, or without losing your memory from the prolonged brain ischemia.   Or they may think chelation therapy might make their Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or arthritis more responsive to whatever other therapy the patient chooses to employ, or that at least the disease would progress more slowly in a less toxic body.

I know very few chelating physicians that take on the management of more advanced cardiovascular disease cases than I do.  I accept patients even if they do not have access to IV EDTA, which I of course would still prefer, I am confident that my over 30 years in this field permits me to enjoy a lower death rate, even in advanced disease, (90+ % blockages etc.). I have success with patients who are “inoperable,” or who may even be facing heart transplant, doing much more than I could hope to achieve with the limited tool of IV EDTA. 

I attribute much of my success in preventing death is due simply because I prevent the usual fatal blood clots that are involved in up to 85% of heart attacks and strokes according to current literature. This benefit I believe is largely related to the oral EDTA activating heparin like activity from the sulfated Mucopolysaccharides contained in the Garlic Plus Formula, aided by the total spectrum of anticoagulants seen in the Beyond Chelation product. I have provided these benefits in one form or another, ever since introducing Dr. Morrison to ACAM physicians in 1984. I was so impressed that I started to work with him immediately after that. We found that we could add the oral EDTA to his formula, and the formula became far more potent, so that you could take far less of it and still not develop pathologic blood clots.  We have safely used Beyond Chelation to replace coumadin on our heart valve patients. We find that the combination of his formula and EDTA permits us to stop aspirin on all our patients, because of its documented poor benefit to risk ratio. (See Vulnerable Plaque by Fuster, Published by American Heart Association, or see my website www.gordonresearch.com.  Clearly everyone benefits from anti-platelet and anti-coagulant activity; here I provide that with no risk to everyone. 

More recently I have augmented these anticoagulant benefits from Dr. Morrison’s formula as now offered in Beyond Chelation, with the proven iron-chelating, anti-inflammatory, antiviral and anticoagulant activity of Wobenzym®. The two of these products, Beyond Chelation and Wobenzym appear to alter the causes of the hypercoagulability in patients safely yet so effectively that I usually discontinue aspirin and coumadin on my patients, after preferably a fully informed consent is obtained where the patient takes the responsibility for the decision after reviewing the literature.

I believe it is these two nutritional products that really prevent blood clots and lower C-reactive protein, fibrinogen, etc, that have enabled me to routinely cancel invasive cardiological procedures, like bypass surgery.  I am pleased if I can have every one of these patients also on the anti-aging effect of IV EDTA but I know too many patients who have died while receiving just IV EDTA, to believe that it alone is adequate to keep patients with advanced disease alive year after year,

I have had a serious heart problem for over 35 years, and had to go into radiology due to my health.  I have studied what is involved in fatal heart attacks. I have focused on avoiding these things for my patients, namely up to 85% of the time a blood clot, or a vessel spasm or an arrhythmia in my patients. 

Of course, Dr. Cranton’s article regarding testing for toxic elements brings forth several major problems in terms of his accepting only very limited indications under which patients would be eligible for any treatment of toxic metal overload.  Using his criteria, very few patients would be eligible for medically indicated chelation.  Whereas, using my concepts, everyone is a potential patient and would be entitled to have elective chelation of some kind as elective detoxification.  

I partially agree, however, with Dr. Cranton’s criteria since by accepting his suggestions only a very few patients would ever be eligible for chelation to be paid for by third-party reimbursement as proven cases of heavy metal toxicity. This is good as it keeps us from having more enemies in high places.  The patients he would accept for treatment need the appropriate symptoms and the confirming results from correctly interpreted provocative lab tests. I however would include fecal analysis, since that opens up treating almost everyone with safe oral chelation for mercury and other heavy metals with a simple spray of a ferulic acid based product in the mouth once a day.

I totally accept his strict criteria for insurance billing purposes. We must adopt some strict criteria like that so that we, as chelation doctors will all agree on what criteria warrants billing the patient’s health (sickness) insurance carriers.   All other chelation would be elective and paid for by the patient in cash. This is just like someone electing to have a small wrinkle on his or her face removed.  Obviously, that small wrinkle-remover procedure was not medically necessary.  Therefore, those plastic surgery patients routinely pay cash for that service. That is how I envision the process with elective chelation therapy, with all private pay. Otherwise we risk again having powerful enemies. .

I believe that chelating physicians world-wide have by now treated well in excess of a million patients with IV EDTA following the ACAM protocol which fortunately, over the years has been amended with meaningful efforts from Dr. Rozema and others. Most of us believe that about 85 percent of those patients have felt that the money was well spent, because they felt better.  We must recognize that was a general effect, and not a vascular specific effect and probably many other diseases will have a similar high satisfaction rate if the treatment is not oversold.

I would like to extend those benefits, although currently oral chelation is no where near as dramatic as IV EDTA, to another 50 million, or more people as cost effectively as we can.  Obviously, it will not be possible to give parenteral therapy cost effectively to 50 million.  Since part of the controversy has been over oral chelation versus intravenous, I think it is important to recognize that Dr. Lonsdale, in the editorial entitled “Chelation:  The controversy,” on page 18 states, “There is agreement that EDTA removes lead when administered orally or parenterally.”  Some think taking lead out is not a waste of the patient’s money or our time!

That is one of the main points that I have been arguing about with the ACAM leaders for several years. They have refused to make the abundant literature about the before and after results in lead poisoning cases with ORAL EDTA available to the membership, so that I finally have put a few of the over 100 reports on the benefits of oral edta on my website, since 90+ percent of ACAM members are taught the opposite!

I want to save the credibility of chelation doctors, who have fallen into what some consumer group might see as a self serving trap of stating to all of their patients that oral EDTA is useless.  Unfortunately, most of the recent classes on chelation therapy taught at ACAM for the last several years have taught this. The ACAM doctors are told that oral EDTA has no value whatsoever.

Our editor, Dr. Lonsdale, has clarified that issue and since it now appears in an ACAM Journal the next person teaching that nonsense from the lectern should soon face charges of incompetence. Failure to know our literature and to be fully informed should be a requirement for anyone hoping to teach on the subject of chelation.

 It is a serious mistake to teach licensed doctors incorrect things, since they may believe it, repeat it, and someday find their license on the line for parroting incorrect and or unsupportable concepts. How will they feel when they learn that the oral EDTA was in a formula with over $10 million of research behind it that works better that any super aspirin or other anticoagulant or anti-platelet therapy today, and the patient stops the product on their misguided say so and dies of a massive MI- due to a clot!!

Dr. Lonsdale correctly goes on to say the real issue is that there is no proof that oral chelation has any benefit in cardiovascular disease.  I am willing to fully agree with that.  I therefore respectfully request that everyone offering IV chelation also admit the same, so we are on a level playing field. No one has proven anything yet.

I believe that all chelating agents are useful as a part of a total plan to detoxify patients with any health problem or merely to optimize health, but none of the chelating agents are proven effective for cardiovascular disease, or cirrhosis or cancer, or arthritis or a host of other conditions, but if we work together we may come up with a way to quantify their relative contribution in the management of many of these conditions.

There is literature to support its use in a whole host of conditions because of its non-specific effects, but since IV EDTA is not proven for anything but the emergency treatment of hypercalcemia, Digitalis intoxication and lead toxicity, clearly it would be difficult to claim that oral EDTA is proven for anything other than what the FDA permitted ABBOTT lab to say in the PDR for years, indicated for the treatment of asymptomatic lead toxicity as demonstrated by elevated lead seen in a lab test. Yet, I know of cases where early gangrene cleared up with oral EDTA alone, and loads of anecdotal reports from patients involved with oral EDTA who CLAIM tremendous benefits, all of which may mean nothing if you insist on a double blind standard. Fortunately there is credible opinion published in NEJM that double blind studies are really no better than case controlled studies, so some day the FEW of you that care to get at the bottom of this may demand that your organization see to it that a full presentation of ALL of this is made to YOU so that your organization cleans up its now sad record of misleading all of you on vital information.  

Since everything about EDTA is still unproven, perhaps we should relax the vendetta against those patients dumb enough to go to the Internet and who have read about oral EDTA and want to try it.  Let’s allow patients that want to take one of the over 15 EDTA containing products now widely available on the market, and who would like to be followed up, while doing that, by a competent physician, using whatever tests he would have used for monitoring his IV treatments, or whatever else seems appropriate?

I will soon have a large number of people looking for such care if I agree to a nationwide Television program I am working on regarding biological detoxification in America. I hope we can all open up a little and admit to our patients that although this is controversial, we are willing to learn more about it.  This is a lot more honest than to say it is useless without even KNOWING anything about who has studied it and when and where.

For example Los Alamos research labs found an average of over 5-fold increase in urine lead when testing oral EDTA.  If you did not know that they were surprised by its effectiveness, then it makes you look uninformed. This looks particularly bad when some feel that you have an obvious conflict of interest, and want to sell more IV chelation. I feel that failure to be entirely truthful about every aspect of chelation therapy leaves the physician vulnerable to either discipline from their medical boards and/or malpractice actions.  Patients spend their hard earned cash choosing to use chelation in place of bypass surgery and later find that, in fact, they still have extensive arteriosclerosis. They deserve the truth and we as the proponents ought to become informed enough that we can provide that. I hope by starting this discussion group to see that more of this truth is available to one and all.

Certainly, the autopsy on my brother, Dr. Ross Gordon who had well over 200 chelation therapies with at least 40 in the six months prior to his death, proves that we are not on good ground to suggest to patients that chelation therapy is reversing arteriosclerosis. 

Nonetheless, we have all seen the benefits and we would like to continue to offer these benefits to our patients.  With the new research suggesting that the etiology of arteriosclerosis and the etiology of heart attacks may be two vastly different things, with the heart attack being the clot due to the infection, some new things should open up new ideas to help keep our patients alive and healthy. 

The new research on vulnerable plaque has clearly brought infection to the foreground.  Failure to be adequately informed on this valuable point may soon constitute grounds for malpractice.  Unmistakably, the vulnerable plaque cannot be seen on the arteriogram.  Yet it is the vulnerable plaque that experts allege is causing up to 85 percent of heart attack and strokes and no one can claim that IV EDTA affects this process significantly, although our detractors might claim that IV EDTA leaves the plaque more vulnerable to rupture, I do not believe this is a legitimate claim but be prepared to hear it if one of your patients dies.

This fatal clot is related to the chronic infections like chlamydia, cytomegalic virus and now, possibly, the nanobacteria, etc, that are epidemic in our society.  Effective management of these chronic infections, I have found, can be achieved with non-pharmacological intervention based on a concept as simple as iron chelation with substances like rutin, malic acid, lactoferrin, etc. (see my web site for protocol for chronic infections) Once we, as the proponents of chelation, broadly change the claims made by our members and require that all of us use an informed consent procedure that includes advice about every alternative available to the patient and also covers the detail that chelation patients may see markedly enhanced function, and feel remarkably improved,  but may not have actually reversed obstructing plaque on major coronary blood vessels.  I treated the top attorney for the California Medical Association as well as their chief lobbyist, while they were actively opposing chelation therapy. It really helps if you can express yourself precisely, and I always record what I say to every patient and give them the tape. These procedures will help change our image.  In doing so, I believe we can save a tremendously valuable therapy for the world.  We may also actually enhance the income of chelating physicians.

Of course, it may appear on the surface that these concepts would eliminate the need for intravenous therapy.  However, Dr. Blumer with his 18+-year study with calcium disodium edetate has clearly shown that his ULTRA “short bottle” technique does offer major, provable benefits to his patients.  No one can deny that his three-minute therapy is efficacious.  Merely looking at him now over the last 20+ years and seeing that he, himself, has not significantly aged, suggests that there might be more to this simple concept of de-leading and metal detoxification, than any of us heretofore have fully appreciated.

Thus, to consume a patient’s time and take three hours out of their life, when a three-minute treatment is provably offering significant benefits, clearly necessitates that we incorporate this information in our informed consent procedures.  A patient is told that oral EDTA will gradually and slowly remove some lead, and that a three-minute injection of calcium disodium edetate will have a more proven and clearly more salutary effect, but nothing seems to offer as much enhancement of vitality and overall function as our three-hour treatment standard IV EDTA.   Then we are, I believe, on safer ground because the patient is fully informed of all the choices.  To simply state that oral chelation is useless, I believe, is obviously bordering on fraudulent misrepresentation of the facts.

Therefore, since everything we are doing is clearly experimental and investigational at least in the eyes of our opposition, and since that kind of medicine is not generally covered by insurance, it should be incumbent upon us to give the best, most correct scientific information to our patients so that they are fully informed.  If that discussion is held with each patient on a one-to-one basis and it is recorded and a copy of that recording is provided to the patient, I believe we will stop 99 percent of the legal actions against our members.

Some worry, then, that no one will want to take the IV treatment if there is a less expensive oral treatment available.  I find that this is not correct because patients all know someone who has had the IV chelation and they do not want to take a chance on anything less than what helped their friend.  Furthermore, many patients are not prepared to go through the sacrifice of making the lifestyle, dietary changes, and commitment to long-term use of an aggressive nutritional approach that I believe is necessary to manage all of the newly-recognized cardiovascular risk factors including LPa, homocysteine antibody, de-oxidized LDL, ICAM, BCAM, platelet aggregation, C-reactive protein, fibrinogen, etc. no matter which form of chelation you are taking. Yet many will decide that is too much bother and do whatever fits their life style and belief system best. There will be a huge increase in patient consultations if you offer oral chelation and most of these will go on a large supplement program to enhance whatever chelation they opt for.

Many patients still want to believe in a magic bullet, and for many who know any of the 1 + million who have been treated, that will be the IV, particularly when you think about potential anti-aging implications   If they had been fully informed in the consent procedure, some will continue to come in and take IV chelation and then feeling that it is so strong in its benefits, they can go home and smoke, drink and do whatever else they had routinely done.  There is no one treatment that is right for everyone.

I also serve on the Board of the International Oxidative Medicine Association.  In that role, I firmly believe in the intravenous use of mega doses of Vitamin C as an oxidative strategy to help the body deal with some of the chronic infections.  Also, in some states doctors will be able to use the ultra-violet blood irradiation technique, which I believe is clearly grand fathered under FDA regulations and thus can be offered in many states.  This may merely require one putting their state medical board on notice that they are choosing to offer this therapy to their patients.  In some states, it may be possible to utilize intravenous hydrogen peroxide or appropriately administered ozone therapy.  In addition, there will always be a need for intravenous, parenterally administered nutritional therapy because we have an epidemic of malnutrition and malabsorption.  We have all seen the miraculous benefits that we can offer our patients through parenterally administered nutrients.

There is proof today that better than 40 percent of people taking standard, orally administered vitamins still have sub-optimal methylation, and require significantly enhanced levels of folic acid and B-12 if they are going to avoid dementia, depression, birth defects, colon and lung cancer, etc.

Some doctors may combine oral provocation for a full week and begin to mobilize toxic metals from the body and then have the patient in for the IV provocation. They may utilize, in one day, intravenous provocation based, perhaps, on a hair test of everything from EDTA and desferoxamine to DMPS challenges in an effort to really, accurately assess the total body burden of toxic metals. 

Of course, with the new research showing that ferulic and fulvic acid, cause a 1,000 to 2,000 percent increase in fecal excretion of toxic metals such as mercury, it is now another convenient alternative to consider. We must recognize that biological detoxification with oral substances from DMSA and penicillamine and dl methionine, and oral EDTA, and ferulic and fulvic acids, malic acid, RUTIN, etc, are now a complete discipline within itself.  Most IV chelation therapists are clearly not fully informed of the complexity and total spectrum of chelating agents, which they may utilize to the benefit of their patients.

I believe we all have a lot more to learn.  I hope to stimulate open discussions.  Since we never seem to have adequate time at any of our organization’s meetings to pursue these concepts in great detail, I am proposing that a discussion group on these issues on the internet be initiated.  This way, no one’s viewpoint will be ignored.  We have become far too large a movement to go back to the “sweat shop” that preceded the writing of the first protocol.  That did prove to be rather effective in that people did take their time, fly to Los Angeles and we went on, virtually day and night, for two days, recording it all so that every viewpoint was heard before the first protocol was written.

That protocol was written with the State of California demanding that a protocol be adopted or they would ban chelation forthwith.  I wrote that protocol reluctantly knowing that we did not know enough.  Clearly, even at that time, I already knew that the rotifer research proved a 50 percent prolongation of life with EDTA.  I did not want to have to write a protocol that was as directed toward cardiovascular disease as that was and we have all suffered as a result of that.

That was almost 30 years ago, and it was not possible to bring anti-aging in as a potential focus for the use of chelation therapy.  Today, times have changed.  Rather than use the language I initially chose, which was that chelation therapy is possibly effective in vascular occlusive disease, I believe that working collectively we can come up with a much better positioning of chelation therapy today that will benefit everyone concerned.

I freely admit that I have a conflict of interest in that I am a consultant for Longevity Plus and that I have spent several years of my life developing a line of products to deal with anti-aging, alternative health approaches and cardiovascular risk factors.  However, there are at least five companies who still routinely show at ACAM and offer oral EDTA-containing products.  There is no company that has a corner or should get a corner on the management of any of the cardiovascular risk factors, whether you choose to do it pharmacologically or on a nutritionally based program, you have choices, I merely hope to share the success that I have enjoyed with my approach and hopefully someone will do it easier, quicker, better and cheaper.

I feel that I would like to save the chelation movement, to which I have devoted over 30 years of my life at this point.  I feel that the time has come for open and broad discussions and I hope to hear from many of you.

I will be in Nashville and I look forward to seeing as many as possible of you there and hearing from anyone and everyone prior to that.

Sincerely,
Garry F. Gordon, MD,DO,MD(H)