Diagnosing Toxic Metals in the Body

Several methods are used to detect heavy metals (not necessarily accurate methods):

•  Hair analysis

•  Red blood cell tests.   Not very accurate, since it is affected by nutrients and toxins in blood plasma

•   Liver, other organ or tissue biopsies.   Painful, invasive and costly

•   Fattty tissue tests.    These tissues store toxic chemicals more than metals

•  Urine challenge test for metals.   Content of toxic metals in urine is tested 24 hours after injecting a chelating agent. Method is inaccurate, since metals are deeply buried in tissues unreachable by the chelating agent

•  Sweat tests

•   Stool tests

Hair samples give meaningful data on heavy metal toxicity - the United States Environmental Protection Agency reviewed over 400 studies of the use of hair for toxic metal detection, concluding that:

“Hair is a meaningful and representative tissue for (biological monitoring for) antimony, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, vanadium and perhaps selenium and tin.“

Probably the best course of action is to just assume you have heavy metals in your body (on this polluted planet it is highly likely) and do a detox program