Slow-Motion Poisoning – Brief Article
Lynne McTaggart
The importance of `multiple’ in multiple sclerosis.
What we term `multiple sclerosis’ doesn’t really exist as a recognizable entity. Although the main problem is damage to the myelin sheath, symptoms vary so widely that the end result is a collection of quite disparate problems looking for a tidy label. That label, up until now, has been MS.
The other reason that MS isn’t really a `disease’ is that these symptoms can be produced by many causes, often manmade. Chief among these, according to Patrick Kingsley, is mercury from amalgam fillings. Of the 3,800 MS patients he has treated thus far, only five didn’t have evidence of mercury poisoning.
Systemic candida overgrowth, allergies and food intolerences, pesticides, moulds, nutritional deficiencies, drugs — the entire gamut of 20th century toxic rubbish in our environment conspires to poison us in slow motion.
The more susceptible among us may experience a buggering up of the signalling going to the muscles via the brain and begin to evidence some of the symptoms that we have up to now called MS. Others of us will just get hay fever.
Dr Kingsley is currently interested in the role of certain viruses in acting as an initial trigger. In an overwhelming number of cases of his patients with sensory problems — pins and needles in the extremities and loss of sensation in other parts of the body — the patient invariably reports a bout of shingles, herpes or chickenpox before the onset of the problem.
`Maybe what they then go on to develop,’ muses Dr Kingsley,`is not MS but an unusual presentation of shingles.’ Dr Kingsley has also seen a number of cases of patients who develop meningitis during MS. After the meningitis was treated, it led to improvement. In other patients, he discovers a spinal injury, such as whiplash, occurred before the onset of symptoms. Could that injury, also, have played a role?
Other culprits in MS can be high-fat diets, low levels of essential fatty acids, the Pill and even vaccinations.
Dr Kingsley often finds that a patient with MS has a deficiency of vitamin B12. Several studies have borne out his clinical experience, showing that MS patients tend to have far lower levels of B12 than healthy people (J Appl Nutri, 1973; 25: 16-40). One US study found a link between MS and B12 deficiency caused by pernicious anaemia. This form of anaemia by the body’s inability to process B12, which is vital to the production of red blood cells (Lancet, 26 May, 1990). In another study, six patients with MS given vitamin B12 complex for six months showed improved ability to see and hear (Int Med, 1994; 33: 82-6). Indeed, there is even some evidence that damage to the myelin sheath, always thought to be irreversible, can be undone, in part with the use of B12 (Drugs 1994; 48:137-52).
Another early sign of MS is penetration of the blood-brain barrier. A type of filtering system in the body’s blood vessels prevents all manner of impurities and toxic substances from damaging nerves or entering the brain. Stress, emotional upset, even eating too much fat can damage this barrier, allowing toxic substances, including environmental chemicals, to cross over into the nervous system, causing neural damage.
One of the most common causes of poisoning in slow motion is mercury, usually from amalgam fillings. In a recent study, the spinal fluid of MS victims had six times the level of mercury of healthy individuals. The conclusion of the Swedish researchers was that dental fillings were the most likely cause, particularly as MS patients often improved when their mercury fillings were removed (Swed J Biol Med, January 1989).
But pesticides, moulds, a candida overgrowth — even food allergy — can overwhelm the body and cause blood-brain toxic poisoning.
This notion of overload or a viral trigger is a far cry from the idea of a `bug’ invading our bodies and causing all the damage on its own. It is akin to the viral (or vaccine) trigger that often seems to precipitate ME.
Understanding all the most puzzling illnesses like MS, or ME, or even cancer and AIDS requires that we dispose of our notion of illness as having any one cause or acting similarly in all of us.
Labelling diseases is ultimately limiting, forcing very different symptoms and individual causes into a very small box. What causes what we call cancer in you is not what causes cancer in me, and my body’s individual `symptom picture’ and response to it will ultimately be very different from yours. Because MS is so individual, it is virtually impossible to treat it with drugs. The best that a single drug can do is to suppress symptoms.
In order to conquer MS, we need first to stop giving it a name. Once we do this, we may stop looking for the single culprit behind it.
Lynne McTaggart is the editor of What Doctors Don’t Tell You, a monthly publication which exposes dangers and unproven practices in modern medicine. Annual subscriptions: 34.95 [pounds sterling]. For details: Satellite House, 2 Salisbury Rd, London SW19 4EZ or tel: 020 8944 9555.
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