Chelation Therapy:
One of Medicine's Best-Kept Secrets?
By Gary Null

For 30 years chelation therapy has been the target of a bare-knuckled attack from nearly every camp in the medical industrial complex - professional organizations, medical journals, government regulatory boards, and the insurance industry. The reason: It provides a safe, effective, and inexpensive alternative to the drugs and surgery used to treat illnesses such as heart disease. In other words, chelation therapy threatens the visibility of some powerful industries, including the multibillion-dollar-a-year cardiovascular and coronary by-pass field.

As long as the attack continues, the human price will be high indeed. Chelation therapy could be offering treatment to millions of people suffering from strokes, cardiovascular disease, Aizheimer's Disease diabetes, and adverse reactions to environmental pollutants. In one study, people who received chelation therapy had a lower incidence of death from cancer than the general population.

By sheer will of its practitioners - and the compelling fact that it works - chelation therapy has begun to emerge from the oppressive shadows of the medical establishment. Hundreds of thousands of people have now undergone the therapy and thousands of scientific articles have been written about the process.

How does it work? In its most common application, chelation therapy-overcomes the arterial clogging that leads to angina in a simple but elegant way. The synthetic amino acid EDTA is infused into the bloodstream; it then travels through the blood vessels and removes toxic heavy metals and deposits of calcium that help form plaque. As the level of plaque decreases, more blood can flow to the heart and body.

EDTA also mobilizes the calcium in soft tissues, where it should not be stored, and moves it to the bones. By acting as a calcium-channel blocker, it may reduce blood pressure by 10 to 20 points and eventually eliminate the need for medication. It also strengthens bones by increasing their calcium production, thereby providing an indirect treatment for osteoporosis.

Chelation therapy is not only safer than the conventional methods of treating such ailments, but also far more powerful. Drugs and surgery address the symptoms of a disease, while chelation therapy goes directly to its causes and reverses the damaging process, says John Sessions, M.D. a chelation practitioner.

People with hardening of the arteries often experience an improvement of 90 percent or better from chelation therapy, according to Kirk Morgan, M.D., director of the Morgan Medical Clinic and assistant clinical professor at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. In his treatment of heart patients over the past ten years, some needed 40 treatments to improve while others needed only 10 or 20. There is increasing evidence he says, "that chelation using EDTA is a relatively inexpensive, effective, safe, and even preferential but often neglected technique for medical management of cardiovascular and related diseases.

While the effects of bypass surgery are limited to heart functioning, chelation therapy enhances the entire circulatory system by cleansing vessels and organs. Serafina Corsello, a chelation practitioner in Huntington, New York, says kidney vessels often have athersclerotic plaque that weakens the body's cleansing process before the heart shows symptoms. "By regulating the amount of EDTA and adding vitamin C to repair tissues, the little vessels of the kidneys get cleaned out," she says. "Then we can increase the amount of EDTA and ultimately clean the whole vascular system, the heart, kidneys, liver, pancreas, and brain."

People who are prone to strokes often have poor cerebral circulation, according to one large study. Chelation therapy can help prevent a stroke or lessen its effects by removing calcium and other mineral deposits from arteries in the neck and head and helping to improve the vital blood flow.

In a retrospective study of 19,000 people with peripheral vascular disease, 82.5 percent of those who received chelation therapy showed substantial improvement, says Albert J. Scarchilli, D.O., of Fannington Hills, Indiana.

"We have seen dramatic results with people who have vascular disease in the legs and who have sores from diabetes or other causes," says Michael Jason, a Cambridge physician and director of the Center for Preventive Medicine on Cape Cod. "Some of them had ulcers that weren't healing for up to a year that started to heal after chelation therapy."

In fact, diabetes responds well to chelation because the disease generally involves the arteries. The therapy may decrease the need for more insulin by opening up the insulin receptors. Pompano Beach, Florida internist Dan C. Roehm, for example, took one patient off 60 units of insulin after only seven treatments. "I thought is was unusually good," he said.

Chelation may also be effective against a slew of other illnesses, including macular degeneration (a disease that causes blindness and that may ophthalmologists believe untreatable, scleroderma, hypertension, arthritis, Aizheimer's, multiple sclerosis, and high cholesterol. And yet, despite the evidence, the medical establishment has maligned chelation therapy ever since articles about the treatment first began to surface. "For several years we have been administering intravenously to patients with advanced occlusive vascular disease 3 to 5 grams of EDTA. An accumulative experience with several hundred patients has demonstrated that overall relief has been superior to that obtained with other methods." wrote Norman Clarke, M.D., director of research at Detroit's Providence Hospital and a pioneer in EDTA's use in treating heart and circulatory diseases, in a 1960 American Journal of Cardiology article. "The treatment of atherosclerotic vascular complications with chelation agent EDTA is supported by a large volume of information," he asserted.

Clarke's research unleashed a vigorous controversy that has continued to this day, raising serious questions: Is controversy based on facts about chelation or on a reluctance by medical associations to endorse medical treatments. If chelation therapy flourishes, after all, costly procedures such as bypass surgery and expensive drugs may be harder to market. "Herein lies the danger," says Corsello. "We are creating less money for the pharmaceutical industry, so why should they love us?"

Indeed, mainstream medicine promotes the use of dangerous drugs and invasive surgery instead of chelation therapy. For example, doctors encourage arthritis patients to use steroid medications, which cause ulcers, osteoporosis, and immune dysfunction, even though they merely eliminate symptoms.

The detractors, for their part, like to portray chelation therapy as a dangerous procedure. Clearly, however, the hazardous treatments are more conventional ones, such as coronary bypass surgery. The mortality rate for bypass surgery is about five percent a year, and a large percentage of bypass patients may even require additional operations.

"Doctors do not realize that there are phenomenal risks to even the smallest surgical procedures when your trying to remove or strip off the cemented type of plaque [from blood vessels]," says Chris Chalapai, D.O., a member of the American College of Nutrition and a professor of family practice at New York College of Osteopathic Medicine. "When you compare the risks from surgery to the absolutely nil possibilities of having adverse reactions from chelation, it almost boggles the mind as to why doctors are constantly pushing for all these surgical modalities before trying something like chelation."

The most enduring myth about chelation is that it damages the kidneys, but studies show it actually improves kidney function. Sessions, for example, has worked with dialysis patients whose kidneys initially functioned at only five percent of their capacity. After treatment, he says, "they were able to cut down on their dialysis from three or four times a week to one or two times."

In recent years, chelation has begun to win a few rounds of its own. A precedent-setting state Supreme Court decision in Florida supported a doctor's right to use chelation. In addition, the Food and Drug Administration finally gave the go-ahead to two clinical trials of chelation therapy at the Walter Reed Army Hospital and the Letterman Hospital. Those studies were put on hold when funding dried up (and a pharmaceutical-company backer pulled its promised support), but as more and more people turn to alternative treatment, and evidence mounts of chelation's effectiveness, another source of funding may come forward to complete the studies. If findings are positive, EDTA may be approved for more uses, and insurance companies would begin to cover the procedure, making chelation therapy available to millions of Americans.

And it wouldn't be a moment too soon.