Dr. Weeks’ Comment: In the fall of 1993 one of the first additional training so I took was to be certified in the practice of EDTA key elation therapy by the American College for the Advancement of Medicine (ACAM) . Since then I have offered many thousands of chelation treatments two grateful patients whose doctor had told them they’re walking time bomb.
Chelation therapy began in the 40s and was offered initially as the treatment of choice the standard of care for lead poisoning or leg toxicity since the molecules given in EDTA find avidly to and excrete easily elemental led lead containing molecules. In 1993 until the present I and my chelating doctors have endured incessant harassment and persecution by medical boards and the FDA whose motives were fueled by standard of care offering cardiologists trying to protect their turf from doctors offering safer more effective and more cost-effective treatments. Innovations in medicine, especially those which are more effective and less expensive, are not welcomed by corporate medical doctors. As always FOLLOW THE MONEY.
Remember, the first rule in corporate medicine is: If the solution is inexpensive, and the problem is insignificant”. Rather than address the causative role of heavy metals like lead in cardiac disease there was far more money in targeted cholesterol all sorts Of drugs including the vilest and most lethal of all cardiac medications the statin family.
But Truth will out in the end – provided one lives long enough to see it (or, provided one does not succumb prematurely to the standard of care treatment offered by ones well intended doctor). So the recent publications on the benefits of EDTA chelation therapy are quite gratifying.
Chelation Therapy – When Data Shakes a Cardiologist’s Beliefs
By Gervasio Lamas, M.D.
As a practicing cardiologist, I sit with sick patients almost every day and advise them on what I think is the best course of treatment for them. In 1999, a shabby, slightly eccentric patient asked me if he should undergo an alternative medicine treatment called chelation, which aims to prevent heart disease by ridding the body of heavy metals.
As a traditional Harvard-trained cardiologist, I shared the beliefs of most in the medical field. I thought chelation was junk science – dangerous even – and that chelation practitioners were quacks making unsubstantiated promises to patients that they could not live up to. I shared my views with my patient and advised that he consider a more traditional option.
Little did I know that this brief conversation would begin a 15-year journey that would force me to reconsider my long-held bias and face factual evidence that proved I was wrong. I led a 10-year long National Institutes of Health-sponsored trial called TACT – Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy – which showed a reduction in the risk of heart complications by 26% in heart attack survivors and an astonishing 49% in diabetic heart attack survivors. Chelation therapy is now gaining the attention of experts in the medical field. And my data gave me the courage to put my own anti-chelation bias behind me.
(TACT) was the first double blind randomized trial designed to test the benefit of chelation therapy in patients with a prior heart attack, who were already receiving conventional treatment. In this study, patients were randomly assigned to the active treatment (chelation therapy) or to an inactive medication that looks identical to the active compound, and neither the investigators nor patients were aware of the actual treatment provided. Thus, this type of investigation is in principle not biased by patients or investigators. In TACT, 1708 heart attack survivors were randomized to receive placebo or chelation therapy.
In the last year and a half, our team has published the results in four major journals. The results are spectacular. And now, Mount Sinai Medical Center has become the first hospital in the United States to offer chelation therapy for heart patients. We know that more evidence is needed before chelation therapy can become a more standard method of treatment for patients with heart disease so the TACT 2 study will soon be underway.
Heart disease is the main cause of death in Americans, and diabetes contributes to the death of over 200,000 Americans annually. The potential human impact of this new treatment could be staggering.
Dr. Gervasio Lamas is Chairman of Medicine; Chief, Columbia University Division of Cardiology, Mount Sinai Medical Center. For more information about Mount Sinai Medical Center, visit www.msmc.com. Follow Dr. Lamas on Twitter @GLamasmd. Follow Mount Sinai on Twitter @MountSinaiMiami.
FURTHER READING
For daring to study a discredited therapy, this doctor earned scorn — and a $37 million grant