[nosianu]

Just to say that in advance, although I'm a CS guy, I also have quite a bit of background in life sciences, so what I'm saying is not from someone naive about bio-chem or physiology.

I got rid of my tinnitus - which was not even the goal, it was not too bad compared to all the many other issues I increasingly had and which forced my hand - after removing the remaining amalgam fillings in my teeth and starting chelation treatment against mercury poisoning. The diagnosis was lab-supported (fortunately, there is no guarantee to get significantly elevated blood levels for low-level long-term chronic exposure) at a university clinic by a doctor not interested in making money from me, and not making any promises, always referring to this or that study for anything he suggested, and who also did not believe all my issues could be explained by the tested low-middlish mercury levels. With the last one he gave up after not finding anything else and the unexpected overwhelming success of chelation. For example, a nodule in the enlarged thyroid that I had had for two decades disappeared within weeks after i felt a lot of strange activity in exactly that area after the fourth DMPS chelation treatment, which made me go to see an endocrinologist to check again. That endocrinologist did not believe what he found - which was nothing - and had me lie down again and repeated the ultrasound, while consulting and comparing with his old printouts to make sure he checked the right area.

With my albeit limited bio-chem background I am well aware that there's thousands of ways for things to go wrong, so I'm definitely trying to advocate everybody with tinnitus has the same problem.

A list of conditions that I had, increasingly over the years, that all went away completely through chelation, is below.

Note that I thought of myself as "healthy" all those years (I would run a half-marathon without any effort and without pushing myself, just for fun), because I considered all my issues as normal part of life and had a brain-block preventing me from thinking about it.

- Jaw bone structure and integrity damaged in four sections - all of them where there had been amalgam fillings. Discovered when a doctor tried to inject something into the mucosa with insignificant pressure he ended up deep inside the jaw bone. He then tested and found the four sections.

- Tinnitus: I had a mild one, I only really noticed it at night. I didn't like it but I thought I could live with it. Well, turns out I won't have to: it is gone.

- Warts on the soles of my feet and on fingers. Their number steadily increased until I started chelating

- From year to year catching the cold was a worse and worse experience. The last 2-3 years (before chelating) when I got a cold in November I'd not get completely rid of it until April/May the next year!!! Needless to say, I don't care about colds any more. If I get one it lasts a day. - More and more times of being tired and needing sleep despite having had enough (sleep). I did LOTS of sports, still not enough. Completely gone, I'm never tired now except for the night!

- Phases of depression, esp. in winter: I seriously considered moving far south because I could not take winter any more. I remembered that as a child I had no issues and enjoyed winter, now I had gotten one of those daylight spectrum lamps to help. Completely gone! I have anxiety attacks, but decreasing in frequency and severity, and that's very different from depression.

- Occasional nose bleeds.

- Cramps. Legs, back, head.

- Digestion. HUGE improvement.

- Candida. A doctor even gave me a systemic anti-fungal medicine (I looked pretty yellow afterwards).

- Skin issues, especially on the head.

- Halitosis.

- BIG veins on my lower arms, ALWAYS.

- Lower urinary system/prostate effects.

- Significant brain improvements, which is subjective and I could elaborate but comment space.

- Speech issues: Occasionally (actually quite often, not a rare event) I'd use completely random words, realizing it only too late. People thought it was quite funny. I don't do that any more, and during the worst parts of my chelation (which I had started with some serious mistakes so that it was quite bad at the beginning) I had even more severe issues, and now also with writing (any text that I wrote, when I read it the next day I saw that often I wrote barely comprehensible sentences that made hardly any sense, but I felt 100% sure about them when I wrote them). All gone (or mostly gone? Well, you see what I'm writing here :-) ).

- Sleep. Both finding it and quality - and dreams, they are so very interesting now! - improved significantly.

- Computer worker issues: "mouse arm" and vision problems.

EDIT: You know guys, based on what exactly do you downvote this report of my clinical experience??? My tinnitus gone and the jaw bone structure damage a lie or what? Or that it healed by itself or was "psychological"?

[avion23]

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I had a lot of your symptoms. Did you have the overwhelming urge to pee?

The cramps were hell. Completely random also. Did you also have trouble balancing?

I looked into chelation because I grew up next to a big lead mine. But the doctor talked me out of it, because this topic is mostly covered by pseudoscience. Do you have any recommendations how to not fall in the hypochondriac trap?

[zabzonk]

> on what exactly do you downvote this report of my clinical experience?

Most of the things you are complaining of are symptoms that many, many people have at one time or another. I have had most of them at one time or another.

So you are not particularly special, and should perhaps relax - a lot of these things can be brought on by anxiety.

[nosianu]

I am well aware of that. But why do you think I'm stupid? I even said I have a good background, even as far as statistics and reading medical papers and even a few courses on setting up and evaluating clinical trials.

I never had "anxiety". I never was stressed by life or my circumstances. I lived very comfortably.

I also did mention that I was at a university clinic and had a doctor, who even had actually suspected that I had more and did look for other causes. Do you think that doctor, who was a researcher too, was not capable? I also mentioned he did not have a financial incentive - when I was still searching for a cause after it had escalated and nobody could help I had plenty of doctors trying to sell me useless stuff. I'm not even mad, they did so after doing what they could with their training, if I had a specific problem within their field of expertise I would still go to each of them, just now better knowing how to use them instead of expecting a solution to all problems (just an aside, but we know financial incentives matter - plenty of reports and studies about useless overtreatment).

All those things I mentioned were stable and increasing for over two decades. And then they went away quickly after chelation therapy. They were not even on the radar!

And you seriously propose I suffered from "head stuff"???

Also, doctors look at symptoms as a whole. Sure you can ignore everything I wrote (and even more that only my doctor and me know) and try to refute every single system individually by claiming I must have about a hundred different conditions, one for every little issue. Or, you can accept that there was only one problem to begin with that caused them all.

What exactly is so outrageous about accepting heavy metals as a cause? "There is no safe level of lead" is official mantra, and I found a paper for training health workers on an NIH website saying mercury is an order of magnitude worse. So where exactly is it so unthinkable that that stuff actually does cause problems in the real world, and not just in theoretical medical papers?

After about a year both my doctor and I on the same appointment wanted (and di) to say to one another the same thing. I wanted to ask, because I was aware of the lab test values over time, and he said it before I could ask, that we had reached the end of treatment covered by medical science and the available studies. But he agreed I could continue under his now more passive and more observing guidance if I felt it still helped. It did so for years, and I had signs, not just symptoms, associated with continued use of chelators. That included reactions from within my jaw after chelation and a lot of other stuff, visible. If all of that was "psychological", then there really is no need for doctors any more and they can all retrain as psychologists because nothing is real.

But you know what? It actually really was in my head! mercury is a neurotoxin, so yes, there was definitely an impact. Brain is chemistry though! I'll never understand this "it's just psychological" mindset, which is the real unscientific esoteric quasi-religious stuff as far as I'm concerned.

[wruza]

Not a downvoter, but for me this comment was hard to read, grasp and squeeze the sense of.

[nosianu]

Really? Okay, so TL;DR Heavy metals == bad and can be a factor for tinnitus. Which is why I wrote a comment, the overall subject is tinnitus after all? The rest of the comment is to provide the greater context and more info. I mention that I got rid of my tinnitus right at the start, showing how it's relevant for the current discussion.

[wruza]

For how long?

Asking that because I also got rid of my tinnitus right at the start for few months, then a year later for a couple of weeks, and now waiting for statistics on its dependency on medications that I try from time to time. Mine is psycho/bloodvessel related - when I stop taking one of these two sorts of pills, it changes its “volume” and “awareness threshold” levels.

[dataangel]

How did you determine you needed chelation to begin with? Did you get Mercury levels tested, and if so what made you think to do that in the first place?

[nosianu]

I didn't, originally, the doctor determined it after the lab tests came back, which included heavy metal tests. He said I'm in a gray area and he could justify starting chelation, but he thought that explained only some of my issues and I should have something else. He never found anything else and chelation had FAR more success than anticipated by either him or me.

I did have a hint before that: after a health escalation I suffered - visibly even (mouth) - from Candida. I even was prescribed, as I wrote, a systemic drug, which no doctor would ever subscribe for the "psyche" because that is serious stuff impacting the liver (and as I wrote, I got quite yellow after those two, or was it three?, weeks - but a lot of bowel issues and the feeling in my mouth were just gone). The problem: Candida has a deeper cause. It's immune compromised people. But there was nothing for me, and the only thing I found was heavy metals. So I went to a university clinic and got tested. Fortunately it showed up in the blood and urine tests, which is not a given if you have low-level long-term exposure and have most of the burden intracellular and/or stored away instead of moving around.