Fw: Medical News - IMVA - Does the Dose Make the Poison or Not? - July 5, 2006

[Guest guest]

 

Medical News - IMVA - Does the Dose Make the Poison or Not? - July 5, 2006

 

 

 

 

 

Does the Dose Make the Poison or Not?

International Medical Veritas Association

 

While there is no such thing as a safe chemical, it must be realized there is no chemical that cannot be used safely by limiting the dose or exposure. Poisons can be safely used and be of benefit to society when used appropriately.

Royal Society of Chemistry

 

Paracelsus, sometimes called the "father" of toxicology, wrote: "The dose makes the poison." The original quote actually is: "All things are poison and nothing (is) without poison; only the dose makes that a thing is no poison." In other words, the amount of a substance a person is exposed to is as important as the nature of the substance. For example, small doses of aspirin can be beneficial to a person, but at very high doses, this common medicine can be deadly. In some individuals, even at very low doses, aspirin may be deadly. We all know that everyone can drown in water and even too much oxygen will do you in. Thus it was Paracelsus’ belief that it was not the substance which was toxic but the amount. But is this really helpful to us today and does it reflect present realities? The big problem with people who follow Paracelsus comes down to this: hardcore believers in the dose makes the poison medical philosophy tend to forget one important thing and that is -a poison poisons people.

 

The word poison was first recorded in Middle English in a work composed around 1200. A poison is any substance which, when introduced into or absorbed by a living organism, destroys life or injures health. Poison is defined as any substance capable of producing a morbid, noxious or deadly effect. A poison is a material that inhibits other substances, especially enzymes, and the vital biochemical processes they are involved in. Enzymes are crucial because every chemical change that takes place to repair tissue or to assimilate food involves the activity of enzymes. Without enzyme activity there is no biological activity, no life.

 

Auroleus Phillipus Theostratus Bombastus von Hohenheim, immortalized as "Paracelsus," was born in 1493. Paracelsus, a Swiss doctor, pioneered the use of chemicals and minerals in medicine. His name appears as a significant figure among voluminous numbers of works on homeopathy, natural medicine, alternative medicine, and botanical studies. Many see him as the predecessor of chemical pharmacology and therapeutics and the most original medical thinker of the sixteenth century. Paracelsus was the first to say, “It depends only upon the dose whether a poison is a poison or not. A lot kills - a little cures.” So he would take a very toxic substance like mercury and use it to cure epilepsy, something no one in his right mind would do now.

 

With the exception of E = mc2, perhaps no other single statement has wielded such force in establishing the popular notoriety and the professional stature of an individual in the history of science as the dose makes the poison. It would be difficult to imagine either the medical or pharmaceutical world today without this principle in operation. Now we have to question, is allopathic medicine killing millions with this principle? It should be noted that Paracelsus has not been quoted as saying, thou shall use the most toxic and dangerous substances for he himself used common minerals of low toxicity in his medical practice.

 

It's such a simple idea and hardly anyone questions the dose makes the poison. The Center for Consumer Freedom, in May of this year used it to attack California Attorney General Bill Lockyer for throwing Paracelsus immortal wisdom down the toilet.[1] On August 26, 2005 Lockyer filed lawsuits against McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, KFC, Frito-Lay, Procter & Gamble, Heinz, and the makers of Cape Cod and Kettle brand snacks. Why? French fries and potato chips contain acrylamide, a chemical formed when starchy foods (including potatoes) are cooked at high temperatures.

 

Proposition 65 in Californian requires companies to warn people about exposure to an ever-growing list of toxins. The Consumer Freedom people question, “but even in harmless quantities?” And here is the rub. There is no one in the pharmaceutical industry, and hardly a soul in medicine or dentistry or in the food industry who will stand up and say hey, we are exposing people to a dangerous amount of poison. All recommended doses of all approved foods and drugs are safe by declaration, whether true or proven, it does not matter. Everyone thinks everything is safe until they are laid flat in bed in a hospital.

 

Normally a substance can produce the harmful effect associated with its toxic properties only if it reaches a susceptible biological system within your body in a sufficient concentration (a high enough dose). The toxic effect of a substance increases as the exposure (or dose) to the susceptible biological system increases. For all chemicals there is a dose response curve, or a range of doses that result in a graded effect between the extremes of no effect and 100% response (toxic effect). All chemical substances will exhibit a toxic effect given a large enough dose.

 

If the dose is low enough, it is thought; even a highly toxic substance will cease to cause a harmful effect. The toxic potency of a chemical is thus ultimately defined by the dose (the amount) of the chemical that will produce a specific response in a specific biological system. "In all of these debates, the key point that is not often understood is that it's the dose that makes the poison," says Dr. Carl Winter, an expert in toxicology at the University of California, Davis. "The tendency is to exaggerate toxicity. It's a slippery slope where to draw the line on what represents a legitimate concern and what restrictions should apply."[2]

 

This is of course not true for something as strong as plutonium. The crucial issue with plutonium is not volume or mass – its toxicity. In principle, using the Atomic Energy Control Board’s (AECB) regulatory limits, we can calculate that 0.1 micrograms can overdose one person with maximum safe exposure limits being placed at .56 micrograms maximum full body exposure and .25 micrograms for lung exposure. Experiments with beagle dogs suggest that about 27 millionths of a gram of insoluble plutonium would be sufficient to cause lung cancer in an adult human being with virtual certainty, with significant risks probably associated with far lower doses,” reports International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.[3]

 

And of course it is not true for mercury especially in some of its most potent forms.

 

A Dartmouth professor studying the chemical characteristics of an organic form of mercury – diethyl mercury – spilled two drops of it on her gloved hand. The first sign of mercury poisoning occurred four months later when her speech began to be slurred. This was followed by difficulty walking and loss of vision. She then fell into a coma and died.

Karen Wetterhahn’s accident showed that dimethylmercury was far more toxic than anyone thought. “A usual mercury concentration would be ten micrograms per liter of blood or less. If the level rises to 50 micrograms per liter you’ve hit the toxic threshold, the beginning of toxicity. You would begin chelation therapy. A concentration of 200 micrograms per liter is toxic, but not necessarily lethal. Karen had 4,000 micrograms per liter. That’s 80 times the toxic threshold," said Dr. John Winn the chairman of the chemistry department at Dartmouth. Merely absorbing a drop or two placed her in the lethal range. "Everyone knew dimethylmercury was bad," said Dr. Kent Sugden but "no one knew it was this bad.On a scale of one to ten, dimethylmercury was a 15," says chemistry professor Dean Wilcox. "Before Karen’s accident we thought it was a ten. Now we know it is off the scale."[4]

Toxic effects of chemical agents are often not well understood or appreciated by doctors and even less so by the general public. Medicine has struggled to understand the toxicities of individual chemicals but is absolutely feeble when it comes to understanding the impacts of exposure to mixtures of chemicals. It is known for instance that aluminum and lead increase the toxicities of mercury by a 100 fold yet that does not stop doctors from mixing aluminum with mercury in children’s vaccines. Tobacco smoking coupled with asbestos exposure increases the risk of lung cancer by 25-fold.

In reality no one on earth knows enough about how drugs and chemicals mix together. Even if just the most common 1,000 chemicals were tested in unique combinations of three at a single dose per experiment, it would take 166 million different experiments to cover all of the possibilities. With up to 100,000 separate synthetic chemicals in production and in the marketplace, the potential number of synergistic combinations becomes mind boggling and would take, according to experts, over a thousand years to complete.

 

In today’s medical reality, when a doctor gives you any particular medication, that medicine is going to collide head on with a preexistent toxic soup in your blood stream. Everyone’s blood is polluted with heavy metals, pesticides, and many chemicals we would not believe are finding their way there. Even newborns begin their existence under increasingly toxic blood streams with mercury being the number one threat.

According to tests done in the US, Japan and elsewhere, perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) has crept into the blood of almost every living creature in the northern hemisphere.[5]

Poisoning – and the search for poison cures – has a long history. Why was poisoning such a popular way of offing one's adversaries? Because both the methods and the list of poisons themselves were numerous, the implementation could be very easy, and the action was often difficult to detect – a subtly poisoned drink was generally much harder to trace to its source than a crossbow bolt in the back. Nothing has changed really and in modern times the implementation is even easier and the action, until most recently, equally difficult to detect and trace back to the source. Most poisoning today is not seen as deliberate or done on purpose. In fact it is usually done with the best intentions to cure someone of disease.

 

I for my part am ashamed of medicine, considering what an utter fraud it has come to be. Paracelsus

 

With the solid reasoning of the dose makes the poison doctors and scientists feel free to play around with peoples’ blood streams hiding behind the assumption that a little more poison will not hurt you, it might even help! Hundreds of billions have been made from this assumption and probably 3 trillion dollars of prescription and over the counter drugs are sold around the world each year. But to poison another is a soul-less act so we cannot poison others and stand up proudly and announce the fact.

 

The synergism of toxic metals has to be taken into effect in pharmacology but scientists and health care officials are still busy fighting about the toxicity of each individual substance. In general doctors and dentists do not want to know much about this subject for it endangers their professional practice, which already depend too much on the use of highly toxic substances like mercury. Mercury is a poison. Why would the major professional pediatric group be actively involved in blocking state legislative bans of vaccines that contain mercury? And why does the FDA and the American Dental Association defend so intensely the use of dental amalgam? Certainly we know by now their mantra….the dose is too low to be of harm.

 

Why dentistry did not study Hg chemistry before 1000’s of tons were implanted two inches from the brain and why allopathic medicine did not scream out warnings are questions we will be asking for a long time.

 

We have a group of doctors literally calling toxicologists to arms reminding them “it’s the Dose, Not the Detection that makes the poison.” Dr. Charles A. McKay Jr., Dr. Michael G. Holland and Dr. Lewis S. Nelson would remind their fellow doctors that “unscrupulous medical practitioners are ordering heavy metal tests to ‘prove’ to patients the need for chelation or other unnecessary, and potentially dangerous, treatments." These doctors go on to say that “A large portion of our toxicology clinic population is convinced their symptoms are due to poisoning, when neither their symptom complex nor laboratory testing justify such a conclusion.”[6]

 

The top five causes of poisoning in a recent study were, in order, antidepressant medications, analgesics such as aspirin, street drugs, cardiovascular drugs and alcohol. Royal Society of Chemistry

 

The whole argument about the use of poison and specifically mercury in medicine and dentistry comes down to the dose, or the amount that will do harm. This amount is extremely difficult to quantify because there is no documentation on the interaction of mercury from amalgams, mercury in vaccines, mercury in fish, mercury in the air, and mercury in other medical products like nose sprays; and how all this mercury combines with other poisons like fluoride, lead, aspartame, MSG, pesticides, food preservatives, other hostile chemicals in vaccines like aluminum and formaldehyde, antibiotics, other medications, the physiological state of mineral and vitamin depletion, stress, and depressed emotional states. It hard enough to follow a sentence like that, imagine a chemist or doctor following the synergistic enhancements that each of the above substances has on the others. Dr. Boyd Haley, the world’s leading expert on mercury toxicity lets us know how little mercury it takes to yield a toxic effect:

The concentration of thimerosal (fifty percent mercury by weight) in vaccines that contain this agent as a preservative is approximately 125,000 nanomolar. In our studies pure thimerosal shows toxicity to neurons in culture at 10 to 20 nanomolar, a 12,500 to 6,250 dilution factor. Calculations, using a conservative approach, demonstrate that vaccinations of infants exposed them to concentrations of thimerosal that could biologically injure them, especially if they were exceptionally susceptible to mercury toxicity due to genetic predisposition, other concurrent toxic exposures (e.g. to lead, elemental mercury, cadmium, etc.) further, our research has shown that thimerosal, which releases the toxic agent ethylmercury, inhibits the same brain enzymes as does Hg2+. Therefore, multiple exposures from dental amalgams, food, and vaccines are all capable of adding to the toxic load of these infants. In Summary: Pure thimerosal was toxic at the low nanomolar level – an extremely low concentration, about 10,000 times less than the thimerosal concentration found in most vaccines.

 

Today, little besides the fantastically escalating toxicity of chemicals in the environment and those used in medicine and dentistry explain the rapid decline in health and the surging increase of a long list of chronic diseases that are rapidly overtaking civilization. Poisonous chemicals are in our food to preserve them, to enhance their taste and palatability; and chemicals are used as pesticides and fungicides to protect them as they grew, which remain as toxic residues in the foods. Chemicals are in our houses and in our medicines, in the air and water we drink and in the vaccines we take, and behold, we even find the most toxic chemical of all, mercury, leaking dangerous vapors in the mouths of just about everyone who has mercury amalgam fillings in their mouths; legalized toxic waste dumps sitting only three inches from our brains leaking 24 hours a day seven days a week.

Toxicity is often highly relative to an organism’s ability to detoxify and eliminate. Mercury has variable toxicities depending on its form and depending on the target organism because there is a wide variation in peoples’ ability to eliminate and detoxify mercury. This is often as great or even greater factor than the dosage exposure. Everyone is not created equal in genetic terms and some people just do not have the metabolism that others do. Add factors like vitamin and mineral deficiencies, which can affect key anti-oxidant physiology and the production of key molecules like glutathione, and we have huge variables that explain why one child is affected so dramatically by medical and dental poisons and another not.

It is incomprehensible that organized medicine and dentistry still refuse to acknowledge the voluminous research findings that clearly implicate this toxic heavy metal in the etiology of most of our diseases. Dr. William G. Drew

It’s difficult to imagine what might have led doctors McKay, Holland and Nelson to discount the large scale poisoning and the long list of chemicals that are penetrating almost everyone who lives on earth today. It would be the highly exceptional person whose body remained un-poisoned, untainted, unaffected to one degree or another from the chemical gang rape that most of us are being subjected to.

 

Children’s systems are under a broad mercury attack from each source and type of mercury. The age when exposed, the mode of contamination, and each person’s metabolism and biological defenses combine setting the stage for different pathologies.

 

Genetic variability exists between all individuals to one degree or another but sometimes entire races exhibit a significant difference in sensitivity to a particular drug or chemical. This has been clearly demonstrated with ethanol, found in alcoholic beverages, which is metabolized at different rates due to genetic variations within metabolizing enzymes. People thus vary in their vulnerability to the effects of alcohol, to its toxicity. Genetic variations in aldehyde dehydrogenase-2 (ALDH2), an enzyme involved in a key step of alcohol metabolism,[7] determines a persons ability to break down (i.e., metabolize) and eliminate alcohol.[8]

 

A great often overlooked factor is simply the difference in body weight and when it comes to vaccines this is a senseless tragedy. For example, the EPA established a 0.1 mcg/kg level of mercury as safe. Therefore, anyone getting 12.5 mcg Hg in a vaccine would have to weigh 125kg or 275lbs to safely receive this vaccine. Therefore, the dose given babies is more than adequate to cause a neurological problem. In Brazil they load up the birth shots with mercury with up to 100 mcg present. The point is that pediatricians are prone to making great errors in calculating the dose and when it comes to mercury and babies there is no room for error. Their insistence on playing with such dangerous chemicals surely will haunt them when they go to their graves.

 

The prolonged effects of low grade concentrations of toxic substances depend on individual susceptibility,” says Professor I.M. Trakhtenberg from the former Soviet Union. The science of low level toxicity is just being born and we are fast discovering that it matters what is happening on the parts per million, billion and even trillion level. As our instruments have become infinitely more sensitive, scientists have been able to penetrate into new worlds of chemical sensitivity that Paracelsus could not have possibly imagined. What industry and government have hid in the low numbers seen in parts per million becomes astronomical when calculated and plotted out as parts per trillion.

 

Markowski et al. demonstrate that even at extraordinarily low levels-- parts per trillion--dioxin can reduce motivation in rats to perform in standard psychological testing.

 

In 1995, neurotoxicologist and former Director of toxicology at Forsyth Dental Center in Boston, Dr. Phyllis Mullenix published research showing that fluoride built up in the brains of animals when exposed to moderate levels.[9] Rats drinking only 1 part per million fluoride (NaF) (million parts per trillion) in water had histologic lesions in their brain similar to Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

 

Sheldon Krimsky's book, Hormonal Chaos, describes endocrine disruption as a paradigm shift in toxicology that fits the realities of low level toxicity. Low level toxicities that gradually build up or wear on the body day after day and year after year, operate differently than acute chemical exposures. Instead of the brute force of large numbers of toxic substances, a small number of molecules can hijack the hormonal control of development and undermine the immune system, erode intelligence, and diminish reproductive capacity. Endocrine disruption is occurring at contamination levels far beneath those of traditional concern to toxicologists and can go on for years without either patient or physician being aware.

 

Fred vom Saal and his colleagues at the University of Missouri, Columbia, have published a series of papers documenting endocrine disrupting effects by bisphenol A at very low levels.[10] For example (graph below), male mice have dramatically enlarged and hypersensitized prostates in adulthood when exposed during in utero when their mother is fed bisphenol A at 2 parts per billion (2 micrograms per kg/day). In another experiment in vom Saal's lab, Howdeshell et al. discovered that females exposed in the womb to comparable levels of BPA reach puberty early.

 

Nagel et al. 1997

 

The acceptable daily intake dose for bisphenol A, set by data reported by the Society of Plastics Industry based on a no-effect level of 50 milligrams/kg, or 50 parts per million. vom Saal's data indicates the acceptable daily dose for this compound should be at least 25,000 times lower than the current standard.

 

Over 6 billion pounds of bisphenol A are used each year to make polycarbonate plastics. First synthesized in 1957, the material didn't come into widespread use until the 1970s.[11]

 

Kaltreider et al. demonstrate that, at extremely low levels of exposure—levels far too low to call cell damage or 'traditional' toxicity—arsenic alters hormonal function in the glucocorticoid system. “We were down in what's called the nanomole range, or parts per trillion, and still seeing these effects,” reported one of the researchers. The metal interferes with glucocortoid signaling necessary to turning on genes involved in tumor suppression and other activities. The glucocorticoid system is centrally involved in a wide range of physiological processes, ranging from the control of growth to glucose regulation and protein metabolism. Kaltreider et al. show that very low levels of arsenic--equivalent to about 10 parts per billion-- selectively inhibit the ability of glucocorticoid and its receptor to turn on genes normally under glucocorticoid control.[12]

 

Arsenic acts as a growth stimulant in chickens—develops the meat faster— and since then, the poultry industry has gone wild using this ingredient.[13] Donald Herman

Because of the new research the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the United States recently recommended a stricter limit of lead, which is allowed to be contained in certain types of children's candy.[14] The new limit recommended for the highly toxic metal in children's candy is not more than one-tenth of a part per million, compared to the previous, decade-old level of one-half a part per million. The Food and Nutrition Board of Institute of Medicine of the National Academies recommends that foods contain no more than 2 ppm (parts per million) of lead and no more than one ppm of mercury. Many, of course, feel these numbers are too high and that foods given to children should have nowhere near these levels of neurological poisons.

 

Sounds like very little though, until you scale it to parts per billion. The old standard for lead in candy allowed for 500 parts per billion, and or now the recommendation is to bring that down to 100 parts per billion. Our official government benchmark is 2,000 parts per billion of lead and 1,000 parts per billion of mercury. Officials cringe at mention of parts per billion and, when we take it down to the parts per trillion scales, things start to look particularly devastating. One part per million is one thousand parts per billion, which translates to one million parts per trillion.

 

It is the inability to see the effects of chronic, low level toxicities on human health that has been, and remains, our greatest failing as intelligent beings. Dr. Boyd Haley

The linear no threshold model or LNTM assumes that toxicity is linear and that this linear relationship continues to very small doses, that is to say that there is no threshold of exposure below which the response ceases to be linear. Thus we can trace an effect when each hostile atom or chemical compound is absorbed in the body. When looking at the parts per billion level we are often looking at heavy storms of toxicity constantly pushing up against the bodies defenses. Take it down to the parts per trillion scale and we have chemical hurricanes, stupendous amounts of atoms and chemical compounds that strike forcefully against cell physiology.

 

Allopathic medicine can thus look like the Hiroshima of chemical toxicity to cell physiology. Already reeling from constant chemical exposure to hostile chemicals at “lower” levels, when we take many of today’s modern medicines we have the equivalent of thermonuclear devices going off in terms of toxicity. Millions of billions of trillions of hostile chemical compounds attack a system already buckling from extended toxicities accumulating from a wide variety of sources. Most drugs work by poisoning something in the body. The art of medicine involves finding a dose of poison that produces the desired result of symptom repression without producing too many adverse reactions. But since all drugs have side effects due to their poisonous nature it becomes a bad game of dice, a kind of medical Russian Roulette when we add massive amounts of new poisons to the ones that are already there.

 

When we look at the fact, provided by the WWF, that 400 million tons of chemicals are produced each year, we can easily agree that the size of the dose does matter. 400 million tons comes to approximately 60 kilos or 130 pounds for every man, woman and child on the planet. The reality today is that everyone is poisoned and affected to one degree or another. The miracle is that not everyone gets sick.

 

It is important to note that the CDC data tell us that children are carrying around more phthalates and certain pesticides in their bodies than adults and that woman have more mercury and some other toxic chemicals in their bodies than men. “This is very disturbing because children and babies in utero have some of the highest risks of adverse health impacts," said Charlotte Brody, RN, executive director of Health Care Without Harm. (See chapter The Most Vulnerable)

For certain doctors and health care officials the cancer rates, heart disease, increases in asthma, diabetes, autism, serious neurological diseases and the broad depth of learning disabilities has not reached proportions to be alarmed about yet. For them the doses are still minimal and the detection/statistics irrelevant. They would have dentists install hundreds of tons of mercury next year in peoples’ mouths around the world, another five billion pounds of pesticides sprayed on our crops, hundreds of tons more of mercury put into the air at our power plants, and even more mercury pumped into kids via childhood injections.

 

When will the dose become poisonous enough is anyone’s guess if you use health officials’ risk assumptions as a guide. Certainly we should expect more from Associate Professors of Emergency Medicine, Associate Medical Directors and Professors of Surgery, meaning from doctors like McKay, Holland and Nelson who are telling doctors not to even bother testing or treating for heavy metal toxicity.

 

The Romans were aware that lead could cause serious health problems, even madness and death. However, they were so fond of its diverse uses that they minimized the hazards it posed. What they did not realize was that their everyday low-level exposure to the metal rendered them vulnerable to chronic lead poisoning, even while it spared them the full horrors of acute lead poisoning. Roman engineers in the end brought down the Roman Empire when they replaced their stone aqueducts with lead pipes for the transport and supply of drinking water, thus turning much of the Roman population into neurological cripples.[15] This is a devastating example of how people can be so very wrong in their assumptions and actions and how it can lead to such massive hurt, destruction and disease. Today instead of Roman engineers using lead we have vaccine manufacturers using thimerosal, dentists pouring the mercury into peoples’ mouths, and industry dumping it into the environment in obscene quantities. We have health officials putting fluoride in the drinking water, which increases the uptake of lead, which is still present in modern plumbing fixtures, all together creating a devils triangle of toxicity with mercury throwing the knock out punch.

 

Pediatricians remain the most disgusting example of people who use poisons. They certainly went too far in the September 2004 issue of Pediatrics [16] where they said in brief: There have been widespread concerns that mercury-based preservatives used in vaccines might impair the neurological development of children, but the opposite seems to be true. Immunizing infants with vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal may actually be associated with improved behavior and mental performance. Pediatricians have a secret covenant with poison and practice their nasty craft as soon as the babies are born.

 

Mark Sircus Ac., OMDDirector International Medical Veritas Association http://www.imva.info

http://www.magnesimforlife.com

+55-83-3252-2195www.skype.com ID: marksircus

 

International Medical Veritas Association Copyright 2006 All rights reserved.

 

 

 

IMPORTANT