Reasons American Orthodox Medicine Hasn't Prescribed Chelation Therapy

Notes from Chapter Five of
"The Chelation Answer" by Dr Morton Walker (1982)

With nearly thirty years elapsing since chelation therapy was reported beneficial in reversing hardening of the arteries, it still is not generally accepted by orthodox medicine. The use of this treatment remains relatively unknown and controversial in the United States, although a number of countries such as Russia, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Yugoslavia, and others have begun to make it their first choice for rejuvenating the cardiovascular system. It's logical for you to ask why such a circumstance exists in our own country. I've wondered as well. In studying the history of chelation therapy, the participating physicians of the American Academy of Medical Preventics acknowledge twenty reasons that could be responsible.

2) Only recently has hardening of the arteries been understood to come from a combination of complex causes, including the repeated abnormal subdivision of a smooth muscle cell, aberrant calcium metabolism, binding of this calcium with lipids and polysaccharides and other substances into a cementlike material, cross-linking of collagen and elastin, platelet aggrega­tions, and vasospasm. Medicine's new comprehension of the complexity of arterial disease has finally caused doctors to abandon their search for a single therapeutic "magic bullet." They finally are also beginning to understand that the complex causes take years to develop and are reversible processes.....

3) Medicine and the media have grossly overemphasized the simplistic blood fat theory of hardening of the arteries. Orthodox physicians tend to approach the problem of narrowed blood vessels as if it was an obstruction of inert tubes. Arteries and veins, of course, are comprised of living, pumping, flexible cells. ... (Chelation therapy) simply doesn't fit the old atherosclerosis model that doctors were taught....

4) Current advances in bioengineering have produced significant developments in noninvasive blood vessels and circulation testing. Use of some of this new technology is easily accomplished in any physician's office if he or she makes a financial investment to acquire the equipment and takes time to learn about it. Painless, noninvasive tests will predictably eventually replace the expensive and dangerous angiograms performed today in hospitals, which all too often lead to coronary artery bypass operations. The primary reason angiograms are performed are as diagnostic precursors to open heart surgery.....

5) Angiography has unfortunately been relied on for over thirty years tc provide a supposedly accurate diagnosis and then to determine the succes or failure of any treatment. As I reported in the last chapter, now we hav proof of just how erroneous these readings of angiograms have been, evei when done by the most renowned angiologists in the field. They simply hav not been giving correct, reproducible information. Yet, surgeons are sti operating based on these imprecise studies—and patients are dying froi operations they did not need! ...

6) By training almost 1000 catheter-oriented specialists each year, American medicine is forcing itself to favor invasive techniques of diagnosis and surgery. Cardiologists have a vested interest in continuing the use of in­ vasive coronary angiographic procedures far in excess of our needs. Car­ diovascular surgeons have proliferated in number, as well. Neither group of specialists has any interest in promoting the use of noninvasive therapies that could be performed in-office by the average family physician....

7) Ignorance, hostility, and misinformation from cardiovascular surgeons, peripheral vascular surgeons, and other specialists whose income is gained from the employment of invasive studies and traditional therapies, have kept patients from knowing enough to bother about investigating chelation therapy as a viable alternative. Laypersons are frequently given completely false information regarding chelation therapy. The best estimate is that heart surgeons and other vascular specialists will lose 75 to 80 percent of their referrals, since most chelation patients are restored to a pain-free and active lifestyle.

8) It's only within the past couple of years that chelation clinicians have been able to document their cases, using the new, sophisticated, and ac­ curate radioisotope studies. Until now, the refusal of these holistic doctors to subject their patients to dangerous before-and-after angiography studies has contributed to the lack of recently published information in the scien­ tific literature regarding the dramatic clinical improvements seen in arteriosclerotic heart and blood vessel diseases in patients receiving chela- tion therapy....

10) Although only approximately 5 percent of EDTA is absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract, some physicians, not wishing to be bothered with the expense and effort of the intravenous route of administration, have utilized oral EDTA in the treatment of chronic lead or other heavy metal poisoning. This oral use of EDTA is considered dangerous by toxicologists and poor medical practice by the American Academy of Medical Preven-tics. The oral administration of EDTA tends to increase systemic absorp­tion of lead, since it gets chelated from the gastrointestinal tract into body cells. These negative reports regarding the use of EDTA by mouth in lead poisoning have further confused the average orthodox physician about the potential value of chelation therapy.

11) A particularly devasting negative conclusion in one of the eight ar­ ticles on chelation therapy written by Drs. Kitchell and Meltzer—-their 1963 * 'reappraisal" of the treatment—has been quoted repeatedly by opponents of chelation therapy such as the National Research Council as the definitive statement on the subject. 37 If one carefully reads the other seven favorable articles by Kitchell and Meltzer, and then focuses on the two paragraphs im­ mediately preceding this eighth widely quoted "negative" conclusion, you will find that the authors had found chelation therapy for the legs actually was useful. The two researchers reported that chelation caused "improved blood flow" in small arteries below the knee, but not in larger vessels. Their statement clearly indicates that they did find benefits from chelation therapy in vascular disease even though Kitchell and Meltzer were incorrect­ ly using it as a "magic bullet." ....

12) Excessively large doses of intravenous EDTA were originally in­ jected much too quickly into patients in the 1950s by the early medical researchers. The result was that some people died not too long after the treat­ ment and EDTA was blamed. These are cases which I shall report on in Chapter 6. As much as 10 grams of EDTA injected daily within ten to fif­teen minutes were utilized, and later changes seen in the kidneys were considered evidence of the "apparent nephrotoxicity" of the drug. Without realizing it, a classic mistake in medicine had been made.

It was later found that so-called chelation deaths were actually due to the toxic effects of lead on the kidneys. Too frequent and too fast infusion of high doses of EDTA will send excess lead from the blood suddenly into the kidneys. Lead and other heavy metals are well known to be toxic to the kidneys.

Such incorrect conclusions nonetheless produced a distorted picture regarding the kidney toxicity of EDTA, which still persists with the careful assistance of the opponents to chelation in organized medicine. The dosage schedule as currently employed by doctors following the American Academy of Medical Preventics Protocol makes EDTA safe.

13) Clinicians not fully informed about the way EDTA acts in the human body have expressed fear that patients might lose essential calcium from bones and teeth in addition to the pathologic calcium in the arteries. In fact, one research study on rhesus monkeys that were administered repeated EDTA infusions did show loss of skeletal calcium. However, the study's procedure was faulty. The monkeys never received mineral supplements and were confined to small cages. They weren't ever allowed to exercise. Lack of exercise alone will promote loss of calcium from the bones....

14) Medical and health insurance companies have generally refused reimbursement for claims from patients who had received chelation therapy and its related testing. This failure to reimburse policy holders stems primarily from a special meeting held by the Social Security Administration a dozen years ago to formulate an official policy regarding whether Medicare should pay the costs of chelation therapy. Immediately following this meeting, a directive to all Social Security offices was received forbid­ding Medicare reimbursement for chelation therapy when administered for hardening of the arteries. Yet, no testimony was permitted to be taken from chelating physicians despite their flying to so testify at the Washington, D.C., meeting called by Theodore Bidwell, then the Director of the Social Security Administration.

After Medicare stopped paying for chelation therapy, the other major private health insurance carriers adopted the same policy.... The Medicare rules are now changing....

15) Before the Kefauver-Harrison Act of 1962 was passed to protect the public from harmful and ineffective pharmaceuticals, following the thalidomide tragedy, the package insert for EDTA listed the drug as "possibly effective" for hardening of the arteries. It was listed as useful in the treatment of angina, vascular claudication, and cerebrovascular disease. After 1962, the PDA was required by law to demand that Abbott Laboratories and other pharmaceutical manufacturers of EDTA prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the drug was effective for the indications contained in the package insert. But the patents on EDTA were expiring and the required medical research to substantiate prior claims would cost the manufacturers from twenty to fifty million dollars and take from eight to ten years. They were forced to remove the "possibly effective" claim by failing to make the heavy research investment, leaving behind with no ex­ planation the misleading statement that "it is not recommended for the treatment of generalized arteriosclerosis associated with advancing age." This statement was probably allowed to stay as a legal protection from potential product liability actions against the manufacturer.

Today, the PDA will not remove the misleading warning without the manufacturer initiating such a request and providing substantial documen­tation to justify any change. With EDTA no longer being a patentable drug by itself, no pharmaceutical company will make the investment for such research documentation. And the misleading statement continues to appear on the package insert, frightening away any orthodox physician who might consider using EDTA for hardening of the arteries.

16) ) Historically, the dead hand of orthodoxy has routinely delayed the advance of knowledge in medicine. Most major medical developments such as vitamin C for scurvy and other more re­ cent modalities have required over thirty years before gaining general acceptance.

17) Most orthodox physicians are trained to only accept the results of double-blind studies. Performing double-blind tests with EDTA chelation therapy can't be done, because patients are aware of the drug's action in their bodies from various symptoms I shall discuss in the next chapter. No one is likely to accept a placebo when he is enrolled in a treatment series for reversing or preventing hardening of the arteries. It requires sitting for four hours each time over twenty or thirty treatments. While placebo testing is standard procedure for trials with new drugs on terminal patients, chelation physicians don't consider it justified to give a placebo to someone dying from vascular disease who could be saved by giving him the real EDTA....

18) Before the establishment of the American Academy of Medical Preventics six years ago, there was no group of physicians competent to judge the standards for delivering chelation therapy. The AAMP went about setting those standards and in October 1980 adopted a protocol for the procedure. But until now, nonchelating orthodox doctors were sitting in judgment on physicians using a therapy with which mainstream medicine was unacquainted.

19) Practically all physicians have been inadequately trained in the new field of using minerals for an organic effect—bioinorganic chemistry—of which chelation is the basic biological mechanism. Indeed, the entire phar­ macology and therapeutic applications of chelating agents in medicine are totally new. The average doctor simply does not understand how and why chelating agents work, even in simple lead poisoning.

20) It's not uncommon for physicians to fail to read their own medical literature in which chelation therapy is extensively described, discussed, and explained...."