Research Chelation Therapy

Raleigh, NC (OPENPRESS) February 20, 2009 — The Carolina Center for Integrative Medicine (CCIM), the Triangle’s leading provider of integrative medical treatments and therapies, is pleased to announce the recent election of John Pittman, MD as President of the North Carolina Integrative Medical Society. NCIMS provides educational opportunities to practitioners, as well protects the rights of practitioners to treat patients with the best health care modalities available.

Dr. Pittman founded the Carolina Center in 1994. He received his MD degree from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia and attended the Pediatric Residency Program at NC Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem with an interest in Preventive Medicine. He is one of the area’s most outspoken advocates pushing for the removal of mercury from dental amalgam fillings and Thimerosal in children’s vaccines. He testified at the Environmental Defense public hearing to discuss the current health crisis caused by mercury toxicity and was one of several speakers to speak at the State Capitol Building to support legislation to ensure safer vaccines and flu shots for North Carolina’s children and pregnant women.

Dr. Pittman is the only local physician fully certified in chelation therapy for the treatment of heavy metal toxicity and only one of six medical practitioners in the state of North Carolina who is a Diplomate through the American Board of Clinical Metal Toxicology. He is a regular guest lecturer for the UNC School of Medicine Division of Integrative Medicine, speaking annually to medical students about the dangers of heavy metal toxicity and the use of chelation therapy as a treatment for this condition. Most recently, Dr. Pittman was recognized by Business Leader magazine as one of their 2008 Triangle Impact Health Care Leaders.

Dr. Pittman was one of a small group of North Carolina physicians who formed NCIMS in 2002. He helped organize the society’s statewide conference in 2004 where he was the keynote speaker on Mercury Toxicity. NCIMS continues to attract new members and associates, growing to a group of nearly 100 doctors statewide. Dr. Pittman said that he’s looking forward to the opportunities his new role will bring, especially the ability to reach out to non-conventional physicians.

“The fact that I’m the new president of NCIMS brings a new dimension to my work, realizing that I am now the spokesperson for Integrative Medicine in North Carolina,” says Dr. Pittman. “My personal goal as NCIMS president is to bridge the divide that has split conventional and non-conventional doctors and help educate more mainstream physicians about the scientific research that exists and supports the use of many non-pharmaceutical modalities.”

NCIMS believes that the combined knowledge of mainstream medical practices and alternative medicine is ultimately superior to a single-model approach to health and wellness. The organization thinks this integrated approach will ultimately lead to safer, faster, more affordable, and more effective healthcare. For more information, visit www.ncims.com.

About the Carolina Center for Integrative Medicine
The Carolina Center utilizes a combination of the most progressive alternative therapies, along with dietary and lifestyle modifications, to treat a wide variety of chronic illnesses and immune system dysfunctions. Conditions treated include Atherosclerosis & Disorders of Circulation, Chronic Digestive Disturbances, Chronic Infections & Immune Dysfunction, Degenerative Neurological Disorders, Fibromyalgia, Lyme Disease, Natural Hormone Replacement Therapy, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity/Environmental Allergies, and Pediatric Program for Autism. The Carolina Center also provides Chemical Detoxification and support for patients injured through exposure to mold, pesticides, mercury, and sick building syndrome. For more information, call (919) 571-4391 or visit www.carolinacenter.com.

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by Julia Hawes
Feb 15, 2009

Children, one of the more vulnerable patient groups, are often treated with medicine that has only been tested in adults, researchers said Saturday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference.

“About three-quarters of the drugs, I actively prescribe to my pediatric patients daily have never been adequately tested in children,” said Dr. Michael Shannon, who works in pediatrics and clinical pharmacology at Children’s Hospital Boston. He estimated that the number increased to almost 90 percent in pediatric intensive care units.

Shannon and other speakers at the “Medicines for Children” symposium argued that the disparity between adult and pediatric physiology is great enough that there are both ethical and medical implications of administering medicine that has not been tested expressly for pediatric use.

“The assumption that children are just small adults consistently results in drug overmedication, undermedication and unanticipated adverse events,” Shannon said. “There’s a great need to expand drug discovery and development in children.”

Shannon and other researchers have found their subject and research areas are affected by the limited number of adequately tested pediatric medicine.

He explained the benefits of chelating drugs on childhood lead poisoning. Such drugs eliminate lead from the body, but not always when the lead levels are lower than with severe poisoning.

D-Penicillamine can serve as both a copper and lead chelator, even in children with lower lead levels. However, children given large quantities of the drug have suffered adverse side effects, such as hepatitis and aplastic anemia, resulting in a high failure rate for the chelator. Shannon described a federally funded penicillamine clinical trial for children aimed at learning how to better study a drug—previously only tested on adults—may be improved for pediatric use.

Gilles Vassal, a cancer specialist with the Institut de Cancérologie Gustave Roussy in Villejuif, France, outlined a plan to expand oral pharmaceuticals and therapies for children suffering from cancer. Unfortunately, he said, many of the basic cancer-fighting compounds are not available for children from the pharmaceutical companies.

“The market is too small, and the return investment is not high enough,” Vassal said.

The panel agreed that the focus on changes in childhood metabolism should be expanded in order to develop new pharmaceuticals, whether it’s in using lorazepam for epilepsy or cyclophosphamide for leukemia and lymphoma. The latter is not currently available as an easily administered oral drug for young children—especially those who cannot swallow medicine—and Vassal hopes research on the drug can be expanded to better serve pediatric oncology patients.

Shannon described the basic ways a new drug are discovered and subsequently developed—modification of an existing drug; test uube or animal testing; basic clinical observation, and systematic clinical research.

Despite two American laws relating to pediatric drug development, clinical trial methods remain controversial.

Shannon, Vassal and Dr. Fergal Donnelly, an officer in health biotechnology with the European Commission, feel that the ethical concerns surrounding pediatric clinical trials must be compared to what they feel is the more extreme ethical challenge—children being administered medicine that has not been tested adequately.

The international panel expressed hopes that there would be closer integration of European and U.S. research in pediatric medicine.

Donnelly dismissed a question about whom exactly the European Commission and domestic facilities are trying to serve with the push for more testing because of the interplay with the pharmaceutical industry.

“We are not responding to the needs of the industry, but to the needs of our patients,” Donnelly said.

The National Institutes of Health now spends more than $120 million a year studying things like yoga and herbs.

Its National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine is applying rigorous scientific tests to alternative treatments. But the center also has drawn criticism for studying therapies that are popular, rather than the ones that scientists believe have the best chance of working.

One of the treatments now being studied is a powerful chelation drug called EDTA.

Chelation drugs are typically used to reduce dangerous levels of lead and other metals. But in alternative medicine, EDTA is marketed as a way to clean out blocked arteries.
So the NIH is spending $30 million to study EDTA.
Edward Colditz, 67, is a volunteer in the study. The retired steelworker lives near Baltimore and has a long history of heart disease.

“It was April 7, 1994, when I had the major heart attack,” he says. Since then he’s had a quadruple bypass and five stents inserted into his arteries.

So when Colditz heard about the chelation study, he was interested.

Now he comes to a clinic at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center every Wednesday. During each visit, he spends several hours with an IV dripping fluid into his body. The fluid may be a placebo or EDTA — neither Colditz or his doctors are allowed to know which.

He says the treatments are no big deal.

“All you do is you sit here and watch TV and holler if you want a coffee,” he says. “I don’t feel a thing.”

Colditz’ doctor is Pamela Ouyoung. She’s a cardiologist who says she never expected to use alternative medicines. But she agreed to participate in the NIH study because so many patients seem to believe that chelation works.

“I Remember one young man who had severe coronary heart disease that I thought should go to bypass surgery,” she says. Instead, he chose chelation. Ouyang doesn’t know what happened to him.

That was years ago. At the time, chelation advocates believed EDTA cleared arteries by removing calcium. That made some sense because calcium is a major component of plaques that build up inside blood vessels.

Studies eventually showed that chelation had no effect on the calcium in these plaques. But Ouyang says the treatment remains popular.

“People think, well you know, I have all this buildup in my arteries,” she says. “Going to get something that sounds like Drano is appealing.”

These days, advocates of EDTA say it may work by reducing free radicals in the body. But the drug still removes calcium. And that can be risky.

Dr. Cecilia Davoli, who uses EDTA to treat children with lead poisoning at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, says that without enough calcium, muscles in the body don’t work.

“An important muscle is the heart,” she says. “So the heart won’t beat appropriately when the calcium level is too low.”

Or it may not beat at all. EDTA has been linked to several deaths.

Davoli uses a version of EDTA that doesn’t remove calcium. But the NIH study uses a type that does because it’s what chelation practitioners most often use.

Dr. Gervasio Lamas of Mt. Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach is the chelation study’s principal investigator. Lamas says the EDTA study is a big departure for him. He usually tests conventional drugs developed in the lab.

“With alternative medicine, it’s different,” he says. “These are treatments that are out there. People are using them. Hypotheses have been proposed about them. Some studies have been done. But the scientific underpinning is less.”

Even so, Lamas thinks the chelation study is worthwhile. One reason is that thousands of people with heart disease are already using the approach.

Lamas says that if the study shows it works, cardiologists will have a new way to treat heart disease. And if it doesn’t, consumers should know the truth.

“They need to know that they are going to be wasting their money,” he says. “So practice habits and patient behavior in terms of seeking alternative therapies will certainly change based on this trial.”

Lamas says the NIH study was designed with help from the American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM) — a group that represents chelation practitioners.

Lamas says that means these practitioners are likely to accept the results.

Dr. Allan Magaziner, a former president of ACAM, is less certain. He’s treating patients in the NIH study at his clinic in New Jersey. But he says he’ll be skeptical if the results are negative.

“Sometimes statistics can be manipulated in certain ways in certain studies,” he says. “So we’d have to make sure that wasn’t the case here.”

Magaziner says it’s possible that a negative result might change the way he uses chelation. But he adds, “I don’t know if I’d stop completely because we’re seeing great results with it.”

Ouyang hopes practitioners like Magaziner won’t dismiss a negative result.

But she hopes the study will show some benefit from chelation.

“You have to be willing to hope that it would work,” she says. “Clearly if I felt there was absolutely no way this thing could work then it would be rather pointless to ask patients to participate in it.”

Ouyang says one reason she’s comfortable with the study is that patients in it are getting the best mainstream care along with their infusions.

Edward Colditz says that’s certainly been true for him.

“Every week I’m taken care of very good,” he says “So that’s what I’m getting out of it right now. As far as what I’m feeling from this, I don’t know.”

The NIH trial of chelation is still enrolling patients. It should should be completed sometime in 2008.

by Jon Hamilton NPR