Environmental Influences on Chronic Illness: Chemicals & the Terrain
Posted on Wednesday, May 1st, 2013
By Gary M. Verigin, DDS, CTN
For instance, think of the known links between environmental factors and autism, asthma and other health conditions affecting more and more children. Why would anyone doubt the connection between toxins and illness? In A Compromised Generation, Beth Lambert gives one reason: It all seems too unbelievable.
Every day, kids are exposed to lots of different chemicals – in air, soil and water, as well as food, clothing, toys and countless other consumer goods. The exposure begins before birth. One study by the Environmental Working group found nearly 300 chemicals in the umbilical cord blood of newborns! As a Peer Statement on the study put it,
The finding of these chemicals in the bloodstreams of the youngest and most vulnerable members of our society raises issues of substantial importance to public health and points to the need for major reforms to the nation’s laws that aim to protect the public from chemical exposures.
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These health concerns are largely the results of gaping holes in the government safety net that allows this largely uncontrolled exposure. There are 75,000 chemicals in commerce, and at least 3,000 produced in quantities greater than 1,000,000 pounds per year. Yet we do not know how many of these chemicals end up in fetal blood and what the effects of these exposures are. Presumably, if EWG had tested for more compounds, more would have been detected, perhaps many more.
And like mother, like child, like all of us. Awful to say, but it’s simply impossible for anyone to avoid chemical exposure. Nearly all mass marketed consumer goods harbor at least some chemicals, most of which have yet to be proven safe. We’re exposed to industrial pollution in air, soil and water. Drinking water alone contains hundreds of pollutants, including pesticides and pharmaceutical drug residues.
Since 2001, the CDC has tracked the levels of synthetic chemicals in the blood and urine of average Americans – our so-called “body burden.” These studies, too, have found that we’re all contaminated to one degree or another. Yet the CDC has chosen to measure just a couple hundred chemicals. Other research has shown from 400 to 800 residues in the average human body.
How Environmental Toxins Pollute Your Body
Chemicals find their way into us when we breathe, eat and drink, and when there’s skin contact. But then what? Where do they go?
Some we’re able to excrete, but constant chemical exposure means that even these tend to be ever present.
Other toxins are persistent and bioaccumulative. That is, they hang around in our bodies for a long time and build up over time – in our blood, fat, muscles, bones, vital organs and the biological terrain itself. How long? Consider: PCBs have been banned in the US for over 30 years, and DDT for over 40, yet both are still found in nearly all adults tested by the CDC.
Many of these bioaccumulative toxins are lipophilic – fat soluble or tending to combine with fat – and thus naturally gravitate toward fat cells. They’re also hydrophobic, tending to move away from water. Since bodily waste is transported by water and filtered by the kidneys, materials that won’t dissolve in water can’t be excreted. They stay in the body.
Bioaccumulation isn’t restricted to fat cells. Consider Strontium-90. This is the radioactive isotope of strontium, a highly reactive alkaline earth metal which can imitate the properties of calcium. That’s why establishment medicine thinks it’s such a great treatment for bone cancer: it’s absorbed by the bones like calcium.
Lead likewise can accumulate in bone, mimicking the action of calcium. It can also mimic iron and zinc, accumulating in blood.
Interestingly, certain species of animals use this sort of storage mechanism for self-defense: They consume things that make them too toxic for predators to eat. This highlights another sad fact: Once enough of these materials are in an organism – human or otherwise – the overwhelmed body has no natural way to get rid of them. Yes, eventually they’ll break down and be excreted, but again, because our exposure is continuous, there are always toxins to replace them.
Impact on the Terrain
A couple years ago, scientists at UCLA announced a new method for measuring biological age. Lead investigator Dr. Eric Vilain said of the discovery, “With just a saliva sample, we can accurately predict a person’s age without knowing anything else about them.”
But while his method may be new, the outcome is not. We’ve been able to gauge bio-age for years, analyzing saliva and urine samples to survey what 19th century physiologist Claude Bernard called the milieu intérieur. The “internal environment,” he theorized, determines a cell’s function and integrity, and a little less than a century later, hydrologist Louis-Claude Vincent developed a method for evaluating it. As Han van de Braak writes in his essential article on the tool now known as Biological Terrain Analysis (BTA; also called “matrix imaging”), Vincent’s
Bioelectronimètre was first used in France in 1946. His method forces one to take a contextual, broad-spectrum view beyond any chronic symptomatology a patient presents. Vincent found that the defining triad of pH, rH2 (oxidation-reduction potential at the given pH) and Ohms resistance was as equally appropriate to human health as he had found it to be to testing water quality.
Vincent’s research in France – where he established his reference bandwidths – struck a chord with eminent doctors in Germany like Dr.phil. Dr.med. Bach, Dr.med. Reinhold Voll valued technique in Germany used by medical physicians, dentists, veterinary surgeons, pharmacists and naturopathic physicians alike. Since, Vincent’s technique has been adopted in many countries around the world most notably in the USA.
Those parameters – pH, rH2 and R (Ohms) – can tell us much more than just a person’s biological age. By letting the health practitioner understand the energetic and biochemical state of the terrain, BTA provides insight to what’s taking place behind a client’s symptoms. It provides a useful guide for treatment decisions and a way to follow the effectiveness of treatment on an ongoing basis.
Most importantly, it lets us know when it’s advisable to go ahead with oral surgery to remove foci in the jaw. For if surgery is to be successful, the client’s terrain must have low level redox potentials and optimum level pH. Otherwise, the blood can’t play its proper, active healing role following cavitational surgery or other procedures to remove oral foci.
The terrain must be dealt with first, for the terrain is everything.
Abridged & updated from the original, Biosis #34
Pollution image by mdprovost ~ Prosper in 2011, via Flickr