The functional medicine community swears by this test. I had a friend who had one of these done which allegedly showed off the chart mercury on his results. Naturally, his functional med doc wants to treat him with DMSA, which will allegedly “pull” out the metals? I’ve tried to read up on this and it’s above my mental comprehension. Please help so I can explain this to by buddy in a convincing manner!
In: Biology
Everything in existence contains heavy metals like mercury and lead. Everything. The dirt contains heavy metals. The water contains heavy metals. Your food contains heavy metals. The bedsheets that you sleep on contain heavy metals. Your body is also part of that everything and also contains heavy metals. There is no way to avoid eating, drinking, sleeping in, or being made out of heavy metals.
Because life evolved under conditions where heavy metals are an unavoidable fact of reality, living things (such as humans) all have a pretty high tolerance for heavy metal contamination.
Provoked urine tests involve being administered an chemical that binds to one or more of heavy metals naturally present in your body, causing you to pee some of them out, temporarily depleting the stock of heavy metals normally in your body. The scam aspect of this comes in how urine tests work.
Your kidneys will normally remove a flat percentage of the amount of heavy metals in your body every day, so its normal to pee out some mercury, lead, etc… Because everyone’s kidneys are removing the same percentage of heavy metals, people with normal amounts of heavy metals will all have about the same *concentration* of heavy metals in their pee. So a 250 pound, 6’5″ dude may have 10 mg of mercury in his body and a 125 pound, 5’2″ girl may have 5 mg of mercury in her body, but they’re both probably going to have the same concentration of mercury in their pee.
In a provoked urine test you’re administered a chemical that binds to one or more of the heavy metals in your body and causes you to pee out a much higher percentage of that/those metals. The concentration of heavy metals that comes out in your pee after taking one of those tests depends on what you were administered, how much of it you were administered, how it was administered (did you eat it? what it injected?), how much of that chemical you absorbed, your body mass, and a bunch of other factors.
Because of all of those different factors, its very easy to manipulate the tests results to look bad, when in fact you just have a normal level of heavy metals in your body. Further complicating that is that most test providers will compare the results of a provoked test against the reference ranges for unprovoked tests.
IE, they take a urine sample where they know heavy metals will be present in much higher quantities than normal because you’ve been administered a chemical whose whole job is to create urine with a higher concentration of heavy metals than would normally be present. They then compare that to how much heavy metal should be in your urine if you haven’t been administered such a chemical.
In other words, they’re temporarily reducing the amount of heavy metals in your body by causing you to pee them out at a higher rate than you otherwise would, measuring how much came out in the pee, then comparing that to how much should have been in your pee under normal circumstances.
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