The Great News Most Diabetes Patients Never Heard – This is the second in a Special Series of articles about solving one of the greatest yet least detected threats to our health.
Something wonderful happened in 2017, when a team led by Columbia University’s Chief of Cardiology Gervasio Lamas, used a non-invasive therapy to save the legs of diabetic heart patients from amputation. It wasn’t a cure for heart disease, but it vastly improved quality of life and prevented premature death. More than 10 million Americans could benefit from this…if their healthcare providers told them about it.
The therapy works by targeting something that until recently wasn’t on the list of heart disease risk factors: heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, and arsenic. These have been linked to chronic illness for more than 100 years, but were largely ignored in cardiology therapy.
That changed in 2023 when the American Heart Association declared that heavy metals are a major heart disease risk. The AHA said that everybody – and especially children – is exposed to levels that pose such risks. It added that the scope of the problem is greatly under-estimated because hardly anybody is screened.
In the May edition of The Best Holistic Life Magazine, I described the toxic effects of these metals, so you can refer back to that for the basics. This month, let’s get into how those are being targeted with therapy.
The therapy used by the Lamas team was for a condition known as Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD), which affects millions of Americans and often goes undiagnosed. PAD occurs when arteries in the extremities are narrowed until blood doesn’t get through (see image). When drugs don’t stop it, arteries are replaced surgically, and if that fails, the limb is amputated. Fully one-quarter of amputees die within a year.
The Lamas team had previously completed a ten-year NIH-financed clinical trial known as the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT), proving that a controversial approach known as chelation was safe and effective for diabetic heart patients – improving their survival rate by 41 percent – a result that most drug companies would salivate over. Results were published in the highly ranked medical journal Circulation.
After that, the team tried to determine WHY the therapy was working so well in diabetics. Based on 20 years of prior research by other scientists, they concluded that it removed toxic heavy metals that interfere with the glucose mechanism, which is especially important for diabetics. After further investigation they discovered that high levels of those toxic metals were coming out in patients’ urine – levels that didn’t show up in standard medical tests. (The team’s conclusion proved prophetic. In the years after that, studies by other scientists presented compelling evidence that heavy metals trigger heart disease more severely in diabetics.)
The team then decided to use the therapy with a small group of PAD patients who faced imminent amputation of their feet. After about forty weeks of weekly infusions with multivitamins and a substance known as EDTA – the same therapy used in the TACT trial – something remarkable happened. The lesions on patients’ legs disappeared and circulation was restored to their feet. Among the 70 percent of patients who completed the study, all kept their feet.
Lead levels that came out in their urine were more than three thousand percent over baseline, while other metals also showed high results. As the levels were reduced, the patients improved. This smoking gun demonstrated how the therapy worked.
Remarkably, the therapy not new and not a secret – it had been practiced for decades by integrative cardiologists and Naturopathic Doctors, but had always been shunned in standardized healthcare due to a lack of verified clinical evidence.
The PAD study and its large-scale TACT predecessor changed that by providing verified clinical evidence that the therapy was effective. Nonetheless, today in 2024, millions of major surgeries are still being performed. Hundreds of thousands of people are dying prematurely due to catastrophic loss of mobility, and most were not informed about the alternative.
This is happening due to a perfect storm of profit-taking, fear of lawsuits, and outdated beliefs, which I describe in more detail in my book, Discovering the Nature of Longevity: Restoring the heart and body by targeting hidden stress.
The scope of this avoidable and ongoing tragedy was further exposed in 2023 when a New York Times investigation found that many PAD operations were performed in the interests of profit, not the interests of the patient.
What does all of this tell us?
First and foremost, healthcare providers normally are supposed to inform their patients of experimental alternatives that they could consider before undergoing radical surgery. That’s not happening in this case, so it’s up to patients to do their own homework. Then comes the hard part.
Most people hesitate to question their doctors and especially specialists when they face a potentially life-threatening situation. This is understandable, and is jokingly called ‘walking hand-in-hand with your doctor to the grave’, but it isn’t the fault of your doctor. Many are forced by their malpractice insurance lawyers to follow the “approved standard-of-care”. Insurers don’t like therapies that fall outside that definition. Unfortunately, new treatments often take years to become approved standard-of-care after they are proven safe and effective. Meanwhile, patients suffer. But it’s also ultimately up to the patient to decide.
The team that performed the non-invasive PAD therapy is based at Mt. Sinai Medical Center team in Miami, Florida. Their number is: 305-674-2998.
About the author: Douglas Mulhall’s latest book Discovering the Nature of Longevity: Restoring the heart and body by targeting hidden stress, explores prevention and therapies for heavy metals contamination. It is recommended by the American Institute of Stress and carries a Foreword by the Chief author of the American Heart Association statement on toxic heavy metals. He co-develops award-winning certifications and standards for products globally and is a registered ISO expert on a global standard for declaring the contents of products.
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