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A MONEYCHANGER INTERVIEW:
BYPASSING BYPASS:
Dr. Elmer Cranton on Chelation Therapy
PUBLISHER’S WARNING &
DISCLAIMER: By publishing this interview neither The
Moneychanger nor Dr. Cranton recommends or endorses any specific
treatment or therapy for any physical condition or disease. Neither
The Moneychanger nor Dr. Cranton guarantees or warrants any
results from any treatment discussed. Neither The Moneychanger
nor Dr. Cranton assumes any express or implied liability for any use
to which the reader puts this information. By this interview Dr.
Cranton does not prescribe any treatment whatsoever for anyone who
is not his patient.
Dr. Elmer Cranton wrote the book
on chelation therapy -- literally. He is the author of
EDTA Chelation Therapy, a medical textbook. I came to know him
through his book for layman, Bypassing Bypass: the New Technique
of Chelation Therapy.
Even those who have heard about
chelation (key-LA-shun) therapy generally know it only as an
effective, inexpensive alternative to coronary bypass surgery. But
chelation also has many applications for improving circulation &
slowing the aging process. Chelation may help various types of
vascular disease, arthritis, angina, stroke, senility, & gangrene,
not to mention lesser ailments, & may even help prevent cancer.
Last I heard, coronary bypass surgery costs in the neighborhood of
F$50,000. After 5 years only about 15% of bypass patients are still
living or have not required another bypass operation. With odds
like that, chelation therapy is an alternative everyone needs to
know.
Nevertheless, chelation therapy
has been the step-child of traditional medicine -- & the wicked
step-mother has fought hard to keep this Cinderella hidden in the
kitchen. The battle for chelation has been fought on one side by
state & federal health bureaucracies, the AMA, & physicians who
claim it is quackery, & on the other side by physicians who had seen
its benefits in clinical practice. (The late medical pioneer Dr.
Ray Evers fought 20 years for the right of his patients to receive
chelation therapy. In the January ‘90 Moneychanger we
interviewed Dr. Evers & Dr. Don Thompson, both practitioners of
chelation therapy. No originals available, but we will make copies
if you send us F$3.00 & a 55¢ SASE). In the heat of the fight,
chelation advocates sometimes made extravagant claims or advanced
simplistic or false theories about how chelation worked. Many have
made plausible charges that the medical establishment refuses to
accept chelation because it offers an inexpensive & effective
alternative to drugs & surgery..
Dr. Cranton has all the
traditional medical credentials. Since graduating from Harvard
Medical School in 1964, he has worked for the US Public Health
Service, & has served as chief-of-staff of a US Public Health
Service Hospital. He is a diplomate of both the American Board of
Family Practice & the American Board of Chelation Therapy, & Past
President of the American Holistic Medical Association & his County
Medical Society.
In Bypassing Bypass Dr.
Cranton takes “a quantum step forward in the task of reconciling
chelation therapy to traditional medical thinking & understanding.”
He not only advances an hypothesis to explain why chelation works
(free radical damage to cell membranes), his book opens up otherwise
recondite biochemical concepts to the lay reader. Dr. Cranton’s
explanation of the free radical theory of aging & degenerative
disease will help you understand a vast body of literature about
other antioxidant treatments in nutrition & dietary supplements.
Bypassing Bypass explains chelation, how it works, what every
heart patient should know, & the benefits of chelation. His “Eight
things You Can Do Now to Live Healthier, Longer” & Anti-Free Radical
Diet should be read by everyone interested in his own health. I
don’t know any better introduction to chelation therapy than
Bypassing Bypass. When I read it I couldn’t put it down. You
can order it for $15.45 directly from Medex Publishers, Ripshin
Road, P.O. Box 44, Trout Dale, VA 24378-0044, (800) 426-3551.
Dr. Cranton recently sold his
practice in Trout Dale & opened a new practice near Olympia in
Washington State. His address there is 503 First St. South/P.O. Box
5100, Yeln, Washington 98597-5100; (800) 337-9918 or (360) 458-1061;
fax (360) 458-1661. Dr. Cranton has a web site at <http://www.drcranton.com>.
The American College of
Advancement in Medicine (ACAM) is the professional association of
physicians who use EDTA chelation therapy. For a current directory
of physicians who administer chelation therapy according to the
approved ACAM protocol for safety & effectiveness, send a 78¢ SASE
(business size) to ACAM, P.O. Box 3427, Laguna Hills, CA
92654;(800) 532-3688, (714) 583-7666, Fax (714) 455-9679.
And in case you were wondering
along with me, I asked Dr. Cranton if he had undergone chelation
himself, & he told me he had received about 70 chelation treatments
over the years. Dr. Cranton very graciously made time for this
interview on August 30, 1995. Why am I re-publishing it now?
Because about a month ago, a friend & I began taking chelation
treatments as a preventive.
The treatment lasts about 3-1/2 hours. Sitting on a recliner in
a very small room you hear some amazing “stand up & throw away your
crutches” stories. Some of the folks taking chelation with us,
especially those suffering from severe heart disease, have literally
had their lives given back to them through chelation. Almost half
of the people we meet there are taking chelation prophylactically.
I well know the derision & contempt you’ll get from many medical
practitioners when you mention chelation, but come with me one
morning & you’ll get a more objective slant on things.
(Our questions are in
boldface,
Dr.
Cranton’s responses in
text.)
MONEYCHANGER What is chelation
therapy?
Dr. CRANTON In chemistry, chelation
is the binding of a metal molecule or ion in a chemical “wrapper”.
The word comes from the Greek noun chele, the claw of a
lobster. Chelating agents (like EDTA) grab metallic elements in
their claws, so to speak.
Chelation therapy is the intravenous
infusion of ethylene-diamine-tetra-acetate or EDTA. The
amino acid EDTA is the wrapper. Its two negative charges combine
with the positive charges on a metal in solution. EDTA binds the
metal & carries it out of the body through the kidneys, without
doing anything else. It is totally inert in the body, except for
chelating unwanted metallic molecules.
The heavy metals?
The so-called “transition” or “heavy
metals,” some of which, like lead, are toxic. Originally EDTA was
used to remove lead in lead toxicity, & still is. No matter what
disease we give chelation for, it still removes unwanted lead from
the body. The average American today has a thousand times more lead
in his body than his ancestors, & it’s a poison. Although the level
might not be high enough to diagnose lead toxicity by any
established criterion, it’s still not desirable.
Chelation also removes cadmium,
mercury (if it isn’t bound as methyl mercury), &, more importantly
for vascular disease, iron. Circulation problems arise when
plaques block arteries. We call this condition atherosclerosis
or arteriosclerosis -- the words are used interchangeably.
Abnormally located iron contributes to that disease.
Iron, of course, is an nutritional
element essential to life & health, but as we grow older iron
molecules are deposited in the body where iron is not supposed to be
& causes oxygen to damage cell walls. We call this “free radical
damage”, & it stimulates the growth of tumors. (Plaque in the
artery is one type of tumor.). It also stimulates the aging process
& cancer formation. It destroys cells, causes skin to wrinkle, &
underlies many of the debilitating degenerative diseases of aging,
including arthritis.
Chelation also removes calcium?
It does, but not very much calcium
relative to total calcium in the body. I personally do not think
the calcium removal is the primary benefit, although it probably
contributes to the benefit. EDTA chelation doesn’t just remove
calcium deposits from where they are not supposed to be. Rather, it
improves calcium metabolism.
Normally calcium is outside
the cells. When free radicals damage cell walls, calcium leaks
into the cells, deposits like concrete, & hardens up the body.
If EDTA removes other metals (such as iron) which are damaging the
cell wall, then the cell wall becomes less permeable & calcium
doesn’t leak in. When the free radicals are removed, the cell’s
internal “pump” moving calcium from inside to outside (where it’s
supposed to be) becomes much more efficient & the “leak” is
plugged. This is how I believe EDTA or chelation therapy benefits
calcium metabolism. It’s an indirect mechanism.
So EDTA does not so much
remove calcium as it re-orders the body’s calcium metabolism?
It restores the efficiency of the
normal chemical processes by which the body’s cells maintain their
integrity so that normal healing can proceed as it’s supposed to in
a young person.
In the past many chelation
advocates held that chelation removes calcium from arterial plaque,
causing the plaque to “collapse” -- like pulling the rivets from a
bridge would cause the bridge to fall. That sounds like chelation
has a chemical “Roto-Rooter” effect, cleaning out the plaque out of
arteries & increasing their bore. You reject that calcium theory in
your book.
Chelation may do some of that, but
that doesn’t explain why people report that chelation’s full benefit
takes three months to accrue. What we observe in clinical practice
is much easier to explain on the basis of a removing an irritant so
that the body can heal. That takes time. If you just pulled out
the calcium & the plaque went away, they’d get better 12 hours
later, but they don’t. They may receive some benefit right away,
but primarily the benefit accrues slowly & gradually.
If I understand your argument,
EDTA attacks the damage caused by free radicals, & thereby restores
the body’s metabolism so that free radical production is reduced.
The body heals then itself over a period of time. Am I jumping to
too many conclusions?
Chelation doesn’t correct the
damage, it removes the cause of the damage --
excessive free radicals -- so the body can get ahead of the process
& heal the damage. Chelation removes metals that are potent
catalysts of free radicals. An iron molecule near one free
radical can magnify that one to a thousand or a million. Remove
that free iron from where it’s not supposed to be in the body, carry
it out through the kidneys, then the free radicals that are formed
normally as the body produces energy won’t explode in a chain
reaction & concentrate next to cell walls at a thousand times what
they ought to be. Free radicals are essential to life, but in those
concentrations they cause damage.
The other things that put out free
radicals like a fire extinguisher are the anti-oxidant vitamins,
Vitamin E, Vitamin C, beta-carotene & the whole spectrum of
nutritional trace nutrients that we find in a multiple supplement --
without iron, I might add. I don’t prescribe iron
unless there is a documented deficiency.
These free radical scavengers or
antioxidants squelch the free radical process. EDTA removes the
catalyst that magnifies the process, & then the concentration of
free radicals in the body returns to a healthy level which the
normal body defenses can tolerate. After that, the body can catch
up with the damage that’s been done & slowly heal the underlying
problems caused by the excess free radicals. In this “free radical
pathology” the body experiences a marked increase in the numbers &
concentrations of free radicals as it grows older. This seems to be
a very important contributing factor to the degeneration of aging
that most people experience.
What exactly is a free radical?
It’s a form of oxygen that’s very,
very corrosive. In chemical terms it’s a molecule that has an
unpaired electron. When the electrons aren’t paired, they become
very reactive & avariciously seek out another substance to donate
that electron. If that substance happens to be a lipid membrane
surrounding a cell, the process of trying to find that other
electron can damage the cell wall.
In very simple terms, each cell in
the body is a chemical factory that produces heat & energy for
movement, digestion, hormone production, healing, or whatever goes
on in that cell. All these chemical or biochemical reactions
require energy. The cell has to make energy. That’s just exactly
what you do in your home on a cold winter evening. You create
energy (heat) in the furnace to heat your home. You burn or
oxidize coal or natural gas to release heat. If the fire breaks
out of the furnace, the house burns down.
The cell’s energy factory is also
releasing energy & heat to fuel metabolic processes that are
essential for life. If the energy factory burns a hole through the
wall, the cell burns down & is destroyed. The energy release
process is the same, but when the energy is released outside the
cell adjacent to the membranes instead of inside the cell, the free
radicals cause damage.
How long has chelation therapy
been used?
Since the turn of the century in the
chemical industry. In human beings it must be given intravenously
because it’s not absorbed well at all by mouth. Since the late ‘40s
EDTA has been given to humans to detoxify from unwanted metals. It
was initially used for lead toxicity in the Navy. Lead-based paints
used on ships made the sailors lead toxic, & they found they could
remove the lead with EDTA. At some point somebody hypothesized that
since plaque & arterial disease involved calcium & EDTA was known to
bind calcium, giving EDTA would remove the calcium, & it might help.
It turned out that indeed it did
help, so the theory was that removing the calcium conferred the
benefit. In our current state of knowledge about the more
sophisticated aspects of biochemistry & body metabolism, it is
pretty widely accepted that calcium removal is only a small part of
chelation’s benefit. The bigger part is removing the accumulation
of unwanted metals in the body that greatly accelerate the oxidative
damage to cells, mainly iron ions.
This form of iron carries an
electrical charge & is soluble in water. On the other hand, iron
that’s used properly for health in the body is already chelated
& bound up in enzymes or in blood hemoglobin where it performs a
healthy function. As we age unbound iron slowly accumulates,
scattered like a fine dusting throughout the body, & it greatly
speeds up the oxidative damage to cells which is technically known
as “free radical pathology.”
Exactly how is EDTA chelation
therapy administered?
It is put into a pint bottle of
fluid & hung beside a recliner where the patient sits. A tiny
needle is inserted in the vein, & the EDTA solution is dripped into
the vein over a three to four hour period. As it circulates in the
blood stream, EDTA will bind up every free, unbound metallic ion it
encounters. When the EDTA circulates through the kidneys they
excrete it into the urine & that’s how it detoxifies the body.
How many treatments would a
person typically take?
That depends on his condition.
People with significant arterial disease -- coronary artery disease
with angina, legs so blocked they can’t walk more than a few hundred
yards without pain in their calves, or people having little strokes
-- really need thirty infusions for the optimum benefit. A younger
person taking chelation for prevention or minor symptoms might take
twenty treatments. Some people who come to us with very advanced
disease take forty or fifty before they see the full benefit.
What would thirty treatments
cost?
Between F$3,000 & F$4,000. It
varies from place to place in the country.
How many treatments can you take
in a week?
It depends on kidney function & the
body’s ability to eliminate the EDTA. If a person has normal kidney
function & they tolerate it well, & if the kidneys are tested every
time to make sure there’s no overload, we can give up to five a
week. More often it’s two to three.
MONEYCHANGER So the complete course
of treatment would last 15 to 20 weeks?
Patients who live within easy
driving distance of the clinic will usually come in once or twice a
week & take 15 to 30 weeks for a full course.
You mentioned kidneys. Whenever
physicians who are not familiar with chelation hear the word, the
first thing they say is, “That stuff’s really dangerous to your
kidneys! That’ll kill you!”
It’s never caused any serious harm
using our current protocol. If a person has pre-existing kidney
disease & he can’t excrete the EDTA, it can aggravate it, that’s
true, but we always test for that to begin with. Like anything
else, chelation has to be given appropriately by a physician who
knows how to use it. If that is done, the risk of the drive to the
doctor’s office is greater than the risk of the treatment when they
get there.
[Laughing] And that’s out
of your clinical experience?
Several patients have had automobile
accidents driving to the office over twenty years of practice, two
were even killed in car wrecks, but I’ve never had a serious
complication from chelation.
Is the medical literature filled
with serious complications of chelation?
No, out of (probably) close to a
million patients that have received chelation, they have a hard time
finding ten or fifteen patients that have ever been harmed by
chelation.
That’s less than the risk of
taking a flu shot.
I’ll add to that. When you
investigate, in every single case the patients had pre-existing
problems & the chelation was given too much, too fast to somebody
who already had kidney disease, or to somebody who was almost dead
anyway for whom chelation was a last ditch thing from which nobody
really expected much benefit. Dr. Ray Evers used to do that. He
would take patients who were very critically ill, terminal & not
expected to live more than a few days or weeks, & do his best to
try to help them. When these patients died anyway, that wasn’t his
fault or the fault of chelation, but they blame it on chelation.
We’ve talked about chelation as a
free radical therapy, but that’s fairly abstract for most of my
readers. For what diseases is chelation indicated?
Chelation is useful in treating &
preventing coronary artery disease (the cause of heart attacks),
cerebro-vascular disease (the cause of strokes & some types of
senility), & early in Alzheimer’s disease I believe it
helps. Chelation also helps peripheral vascular disease, which
afflicts smokers & people with diabetes more than others. The blood
vessels in the legs become blocked & start to turn black with
gangrene or become infected & won’t heal. They end up needing
amputations
Equally important, I believe, is
that if chelation is done before cancer develops, it’s a
preventive for cancer. One study compares a fairly large population
of people who got chelation versus a group who did not. Followed
over 18 years the chelated patients experienced a death rate from
cancer only 10% as high as those who did not get chelation. But
that doesn’t mean the chelation is a treatment for cancer, because
none of these people had cancer when they were treated. The
occurrence of cancer among them was reduced by 90% later on,
when compared to the non-chelated group.
A very close friend of mine has
been suffering terribly with his neck. An traditional physician had
diagnosed his condition as arthritis, & was treating him with drugs,
but the problem was getting worse. He has now had 10 or 12
chelation treatments & for the first time in 2-1/2 years he is free
of pain & almost free from unpredictable episodes of debilitation.
It’s very dramatic when you see it in someone you know. What about
chelation for arthritis generally?
The pain & inflammation of arthritis
is a free radical process. EDTA can reduce inflammation. The main
problem we have in arthritis is with weight-bearing joints like hips
& knees where the cartilage is worn away leaving bone on bone.
That’s a mechanical problem akin to throwing sand in the gears of a
piece of machinery for years & years. Chelation is not nearly as
useful in relieving that because the lubricative surface is missing
from the joint. You described a neck problem where it’s quite a
different process. Chelation often relieves arthritis, sometimes
dramatically, in non-weight-bearing joints like hands, although I
don’t make claims that chelation cures arthritis. It’s body, it’s
unpredictable, but almost always chelation makes the disease easier
to control & less painful.
What about Parkinson’s Disease?
Parkinson’s is not a disease, it’s a
syndrome. By that I mean it’s a set of symptoms with many different
causes: viral infections that destroy brain cells, strokes that
destroy a part of the brain, hereditary factors, a lack of blood
flow to certain parts of the brain. If the brain is still viable &
merely starved for blood, then EDTA can improve it. If that part of
the brain has already been damaged & lost from stroke, then EDTA
can’t bring it back. It can prevent another stroke, but it can’t
correct the underlying problem. So in Parkinson’s chelation is
sometimes helpful, but not as often as we’d like.
Is the same true of advanced
Alzheimer’s?
Exactly. In advanced Alzheimer’s
the brain cells are gone. They’re dead, just a tangle of fibrous
material under a microscope at autopsy. I don’t know anything short
of a true miracle that’s going to bring those nerve cells back.
But, in the early stage of the disease when the cells are still
alive but beginning to malfunction, I personally believe that free
radicals are part of the problem. From a lot of clinical experience
I know that EDTA can arrest or slow the progression of the disease,
& maybe even bring it back some.
My grandfather died at 83 in
1957. He had what we used to call “hardening of the arteries” the
last two or three years. I had two other grandparents who ate a
high fat diet, three big meals a day. They grew & canned or froze
all their own food but still ate a diet heavy with meat. They both
lived to 84-85 with minds perfectly clear to the end. I’m 48, & it
just seems to me that people used to get old & then just died. They
weren’t debilitated for the last 10 or 15 years of their lives. Am
I imagining that?
No, I think that’s true. The 20th
century exposes us to many things that are toxic. There are more
chemicals under the kitchen sink of the average home today than
there were in a chemistry laboratory 50 years ago. The janitorial
people walk through office buildings in the evening with carts laden
with chemicals, & people come to work in the morning & breathe all
these fumes. They spray insecticides around to kill the insects, &
put chemicals in the air & in the water. Then on the other side,
the trace nutrients like selenium & chromium are depleted in the
soil. Since plants do not need these trace elements, farmers don’t
add them back to the soil, even though humans need them for health &
for cholesterol & fat metabolism. The same soil has been used over
& over for centuries, & the trace elements are depleted so that each
successive generation that eats off those soils is less & less well
nourished, no matter how many calories they are getting. I think
all of these things play a role.
Even if you buy fresh & wholesome
foods in the supermarket, the soils on which the food is grown is
not healthy, so the foods don’t contain what they contained 50 years
ago. You can’t see those trace amounts of elements, but the human
body depends upon them for health. That’s the reason you need to
take dietary supplements.
And modern distribution
interposes a long delay from field to plate. I can pull a head of
cabbage or lettuce from my garden & thirty minutes later eat it. It
tastes nothing like the cabbage or lettuce I buy at the store.
The nutritional value is far
superior.
Thank you very much, Dr. Cranton.
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