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How microimmunotherapy makes use of homeopathy?

I was first introduced to homeopathy many years ago when I was watching an internet summit on paediatric health. The talk was about how homeopathy can be used, especially in emergencies, and the speaker was talking about how homeopathic remedies provide healing without suppressing symptoms. For example, if you gave an antipyretic to a child with a fever, you were suppressing the body’s response and therefore preventing the body from developing the ability to cope with illness. It was explained that this is not the case with homeopathy.

This speech and the stories of those who told that they were cured by homeopathic methods made me curious about homeopathy, but at that time, perhaps like many of us, I thought that homeopathy was a kind of herbal treatment and I had not investigated the way it worked. By the way, homeopathic “remedies”(this expression is used instead of medicine in homeopathy) that evoke toxins such as “mercurius”, “arsenicum” also sounded a little suspicious…

Then, in a training I attended on a different subject, I met one of our well-known homeopaths and he told me that the substances used to prepare homeopathic remedies are diluted many times and when analysed, that substance can no longer be detected in the remedy. In fact, he said that it was not the substances themselves in the remedies, but their “spirit”.

Unfortunately, after this short talk, I said “hmmmmmmmm” to myself and moved away from homeopathy and did not feel the need to research homeopathy further with many other topics in my focus. No matter how open-minded I think I am, as a person who has been raised with modern medicine and a scientific perspective, I may have difficulty accepting some ideas and I expect more concrete explanations.

After a while, I became interested in homeopathy again. A few of my patients, who came one after the other by coincidence, told me about the results they obtained with homeopathy.

As I mentioned above, the remedies used in homeopathy are obtained by repeatedly diluting a substance that is deemed suitable for a particular condition. The principle of “like cures like” is the basis of homeopathy. For those who do not know homeopathy, this may not make much sense. When we look at the origin story of homeopathy, we can better understand what is meant. The father of homeopathic ingredients, Dr. Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) develops homeopathic treatment, which causes the same diseases caused by malaria and the diseases caused by consuming the bark of the cinchona plant (containing quinine), which has been used against malaria for many years. Initially he diluted the remedies to make them less toxic and easier to tolerate, but over time he came to believe that more dilution gave better results and he used more and more diluted remedies (ref). The remedies currently used in homeopathy are obtained by repeatedly diluting the substances to very large numbers, such as 10⁶⁰⁰ or 10⁴⁰⁰ (ref). Shaking these diluted solutions is also part of the remediation process.

In short, we are talking about quantities that are not in the doses we are accustomed to from medicines and supplements, even if they are nano-sized in the remedy (ref), they will disappear like a drop in the ocean when they enter the body.

From Homeopathy to “Microimmunotherapy”

I met the field of microimmunotherapy at a conference I attended in 2019. When Beatrice Lejeune, a researcher named Beatrice Lejeune, who explained the immunological response seen in gingivitis step by step, explained how they developed a drug by diluting interleukins and TNFs, which play a role in inflammation, and how they stopped inflammation with this drug, I thought, “Wait a minute! Isn’t this homeopathy?” When you dilute the inflammatory substances themselves, you stop the inflammation! After a few minutes, he started to talk about diluting the drugs so many times as “homeopathic doses”. He even started to joke: “Can you believe it, we got EU funding for a study involving homeopathy!”

Microimmunotherapy aims to regulate the response of the immune system and fight diseases by using substances belonging to the immune system. It uses “cytokines” produced by the body itself. And in doing so, it dilutes these substances many times over, as in homeopathy (ref). And just like the “like cures like” principle of homeopathy, when the cytokine that plays a role in the course of the disease is diluted in homeopathic doses and applied, the destruction order normally given by that cytokine stops!

In microimmunotherapy, different actors (RANTES, Il6, Il1b, TNFa, etc.) that play a role in each stage of inflammation are taken into account and these agents are administered to the patient in a specific order in different dilution doses. The course of inflammatory events is modified. For example, the development of fatty degenerative osteonecrosis of the jawbone is thought to be caused by too much RANTES in the environment after tooth extraction, which stimulates the formation of fatty tissue instead of bone formation. In microimmunotherapy, the administration of too much diluted RANTES promotes bone formation by inhibiting RANTES activity (this can be found in the research of Beatrice Lejeune and J. Lechner) (ref). Studies on microimmunotherapy, both in the lab and in humans and animals, can be found here.

But how does this work? This question was rightly asked during the talk… How is it that the substance itself is in the body, but when given externally in very low doses, it gives such a result? Speaker Lejeune said that we don’t know and that whoever finds the answer will either get a Nobel Prize or be labelled a buffoon!

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Holistic Oral Examination

We cannot treat oral and dental problems as if they are problems specific to the mouth, independent of general health. Problems in the mouth can both point to other problems in the body and can be the cause of these problems!

Holistic Oral Examination
In Featured, Nutrition, Uncategorized

How Much Calcium Can We Absorb from Different Foods?

When removing a food group from our diet, we sometimes cannot calculate what we should include instead. For example, think that your breakfast consists of cheese, olives, tomatoes, cucumbers and eggs (typical Turkish breakfast). One day you realize that you are intolerant to dairy. When you only take out the cheese and continue with the rest, you are saved from a food that is harming you, but on the other hand, there is a possibility that some of the nutrients you get with that food will diminish. Therefore, when removing a food group, it is necessary to take a look at which micronutrients come with it. In this article, I will share how much calcium we can get from which alternative calcium sources, especially for those who exclude dairy products from their diet for various reasons.

Normally, you can easily find information about the calcium content of food. However, to find out how much calcium you actually get from a food, we need to take into account how much of the calcium in that food can be absorbed by the body. For example, the absorbable part of 300mg calcium contained in a glass of milk is 32%. This means that we get 96mg of calcium from 1 glass of milk (240g). The same amount of calcium-rich spinach (240g) contains 322mg of calcium, more than 1 glass of milk; However, since only 5% of it can be absorbed, we only get 16mg of it. That’s why I prepared the list below so that we can make our calculation according to this absorbable calcium. Don’t worry, spinach is a bit of an extreme example… You can see that many vegetables on the list have a lot of absorbable calcium.

Of course, before we can use the list, we need to know how much calcium we need. You can find the recommended daily intake of calcium according to age in the table below (1).

Age Male Female
0–6 months* 200 mg 200 mg
7–12 months* 260 mg 260 mg
1–3 years 700 mg 700 mg
4–8 years 1,000 mg 1,000 mg
9–13 years 1,300 mg 1,300 mg
14–18 years 1,300 mg 1,300 mg
19–50 years 1,000 mg 1,000 mg
51–70 years 1,000 mg 1,200 mg
71+ years 1,200 mg 1,200 mg

* adequate intake (this warning in the original source may mean that the ideal intake for these age groups may be higher.)

In this table, the recommended daily intake of 1000mg for an adult, actually refers to dietary calcium, not the absorbable amount. How do we understand this? It is recommended that we consume 3-4 portions of dairy products to meet our daily calcium needs. If all 1000mg were to be absorbed daily, it would be recommended to consume 10 portions of dairy products since we would get 96mg absorbable calcium from 1 serving of dairy products. Based on this, we can say that the recommended amount of calcium to be absorbed daily is 300-400mg (5).

Let’s also briefly mention that there are different opinions about whether this is the amount of calcium we really need. Different factors such as physical activity, estrogen hormone and vitamin D level can also change the amount of calcium we need. Asian and African societies with fewer bone fractures with less calcium intake, raise questions about the recommended amounts of calcium. Of course, there are so many variables in diet and lifestyle that it is difficult to explain this difference with calcium intake alone.

After this detail, we can move on to the table showing the absorbable calcium amounts in foods. Hope this helps you to regulate your diet …

 

 

FOOD PORTION SIZE CALCIUM ABSORBED
Bone (eg. softened bones in chicken bone broth) 3 g 270mg
Collard greens 1 cup cooked(≅ 190g) 173mg
Turnip greens 1 cup cooked(≅ 190g) 102mg
Feta Cheese 30g 96.3mg
Yoghurt 240g 96.3mg
Milk 1 bardak 96.3mg
Sardines (with bones) 106g 95mg
Canned Salmon (with bones) 106g 71mg
Chinese cabbage 1 cup cooked(≅ 170g) 69-85mg
Broccoli 1 cup cooked(≅ 156g) 57mg
Kale 1 cup cooked(≅ 125g) 46mg
Mineral water

(San Pellegrino, one of the highest Ca containing)

 500ml 41-45mg
Mustard Greens 1 cup cooked(≅ 190g) 42mg
White Beans 110g 24.7mg
Rutabaga 85g 22mg
Almond 28g 17mg
Red Beans 110g 15.3mg
Spinach 1 cup cooked(≅ 180g) 12mg
Radish 50g 10.4mg
Sesame (hulled) 28g 7.7mg
Sweet potato 164g 9.8mg
In Biological Dentistry, Safe Amalgam Removal, Uncategorized

Genetic Predisposition To Mercury Toxicity

While some people observe that their health problems begin after amalgam fillings are made or removed without taking the necessary precautions, others can feel healthy even though they have had amalgam fillings for years.

Of course, everyone’s criteria for being healthy can be different. Someone whose body gives serious alarms is so accustomed to living with these symptoms that they consider themselves healthy.

However, it would not be wrong to say that not everyone exposed to mercury has the same problems. Some people seem to cope with mercury or other toxins more easily, while in others these types of toxins can cause many health problems.

Why are some people more affected by mercury than others?

There may be many reasons for this: the amount of toxins that are exposed, whether this amount accumulates over time or is exposed at once, exposure to more than one toxin at the same time and increasing the effects of each other, such as pathogenic bacterial toxins present in the body.

Another reason that is getting more and more attention is that certain aberrations (polymorphisms or SNPs) in a person’s genetic sequence make that person more susceptible to the effects of toxins.

The introductory part of the article describing a study conducted on members of the American Dental Association in 2015 included the following comment:

“One of the major challenges in performing the risk assessment of mercury is that, despite exposure to similar mercury levels, […] there are huge differences between members of communities in terms of mercury measured in hair (Canuel et al., 2005).” In other words, although people seem to be exposed to the same amount of mercury, the amount of mercury they can throw out can be different. Let’s continue… “Although the source and dose of mercury may explain to some extent the difference in mercury content between individuals, differences in the absorption, distribution and elimination processes (in other words, toxicokinetics) of mercury may also play an important role in the formation of this distinction. Mercury toxicokinetics can be affected, for example, by changes in functional enzymes and proteins that transport, oxidize or reduce mercury (Gundacker et al., 2010).” (1)

As a result of her study of 500 children in 2013, Woods said:

  • Abnormalities in genes (SNPs) that enable the body to produce metallothionein increase the susceptibility of children to mercury neurotoxicity.
  • The relationship between mercury and neurobehavioral performance was observed mostly in boys.
  • In children with 2 metallothionein SNPs, the adverse effect of mercury on performance was measured at the highest level. (2)

Now let’s look at what metallotionein does in the body:

Metallothioneins are small proteins containing sulfhydryl groups that bind to zinc, copper, iron, cadmium, mercury, and other metals (3). With these properties, they not only regulate zinc metabolism, but also act as a natural chelator in the body and play a role in removing toxic metals from the body (4).

In an experiment to better understand the role of metallothioneins, the researchers silenced the mice’s MT-I and MT-II genes. While this appeared to have no developmental effects in the mice, they became more susceptible to cadmium poisoning. On the other hand, increasing MT genes increased their resistance to cadmium (5).

In short, even a difference in a gene that produces only one protein can adversely affect the excretion of metals and therefore mercury, leading to the accumulation of too many toxins for the body to cope with.

You can find other genetic variations that come to the fore in mercury research in my previous article titled “Facts About Amalgam Fillings“.

If we’re genetically unlucky…

We now know that our genes are not destiny. Epigenetics has shown that environmental factors can play a huge role in how genes are expressed. The environment you create for your body can control your genes’ on-off switches. Many factors such as what you eat, sleep, getting sunlight, spending time in nature, having good social relationships, and breathing properly can make this environment better. You may think these are irrelevant, but each one of them makes it easier for the biochemical events in the body to run smoothly.

Of course, while trying to increase the body’s ability to cope with toxins, let’s also remember that we should reduce the toxins we are exposed to from the outside as much as we can and lighten the burden of the body…

Resources:

  1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26673400
  2.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0892036213001669
  3. N.V. BHAGAVAN, in Medical Biochemistry (Fourth Edition), 2002
  4. Susan L.-A. Samson, Lashitew Gedamu, in Progress in Nucleic Acid Research and Molecular Biology, 1997
  5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S007966030861034X
In Biological Dentistry, Safe Amalgam Removal, Uncategorized

Is It Possible to Remove Heavy Metals by Sweating?

Sweating is known as a good way to remove toxins and is considered among the general recommendations for detox. So how effective is sweating when it comes to heavy metals? When he hears round words like me, “Do we accept it as true because it is repeated thousands of times, or is it really like that?” If you are one of those who think, this article, which I will talk about research on sweating, may be of interest to you. I recently wrote this article on greenmedinfo.com, on an article by its founder Sayer Ji. However, in his article, he emphasized that sweating does not only help to regulate body temperature, but is also important in removing toxins, while I shared the points that caught my attention from a study that I reached from the bibliography of the article and compiled many studies.

In a nutshell

The amount of heavy metals excreted by perspiration in individuals in the studies was generally higher than the amount of heavy metals detected in their urine and blood. In some individuals, while heavy metals were detected in sweat, it could not be detected in blood or urine. Exercise, sauna or sweat-stimulating drugs were used to make the participants sweat.

Meanwhile, Sayer Ji, in his article, included studies showing that bisphenol-A (BPA) and phthalates, which are found in plastics and are associated with many health problems, are also higher in sweat than their amounts in urine and blood serum. Even here, while these substances could not be detected in the urine or blood of some participants, they were detected in the sweat. So sweat can also be a good excretion method for these substances.

Now back to heavy metals. The results of the studies that caught my attention from an analysis of more than 20 studies that measured mercury, lead, cadmium, and arsenic are as follows (2):

Mercury:

  • In a study conducted in Canada, in which 10 healthy individuals and 10 individuals with chronic problems were examined, we can say that the average blood, urine and sweat mercury levels were close to each other even though they were slightly higher in sweat (0.61, 0.65, 0.86 mcg/L, respectively). However, while the number of people who detected mercury in all three samples was 16, only mercury was found in sweat in the remaining 4 people. In other words, if these people had blood and urine mercury tests for diagnostic purposes, the result would be negative, and it would be thought that they did not have mercury in their bodies.
  • In a case shared in 1978, the treatment of a worker who was exposed to mercury vapor for an hour a day while working at a place that produced thermometers for 13 years. The patient, who became incapacitated in the last 6 months, was first given various chelation agents for two months. Then, sweating and physiotherapy sessions were applied every day for a few months. During the treatment, it was observed that mercury was removed from the sweat by measurements. At the end of the treatment, the amount of mercury measured in the blood, urine and sweat decreased to normal levels without any side effects in the patient (3).

Lead:

  • In the Canadian study I mentioned above, the average amounts of lead in sweat, blood and urine were found to be 31, 0.12, 1.8 mcg/L. Here, we see that the amount of sweat excreted is quite high. Lead was detected in all three samples in all participants. Lead is everywhere!
  • In 1991, a very interesting study was conducted in England. Two volunteers drank lead chloride once or twice, for a total of 20mg! What kind of science is this? Or were they two researchers willing to even drink poison to complete their doctorate? We do not know these… But as a result, this lead compound, which was measured in the acute period, was not excreted much in sweat this time. It reached its highest level in the blood 4 hours after ingesting lead. It maintained this high level in the first 24 hours and gradually decreased over the next few weeks. Similar amounts were also detected in the urine. I was so intrigued by this work that I opened it and read it and realized that this was not actually the first time! There are many other works. In one of these, a researcher had 16 -initially- healthy subjects drink nickel! And after that, he could not see a significant breakthrough in sweat. Although there is an increase in nickel in the blood and urine… Our researchers who drink lead have drawn the following conclusion, taking into account other previous studies: These types of heavy metals are more common in blood and urine, since they have not yet penetrated into the tissues in the acute stage. When it is exposed chronically, accumulation in the tissues increases, and therefore it’s excretion with sweat also increases (4).
  • In a study conducted in Germany in 1986, the amount of lead thrown by aerobic endurance training (rowing) was found to be higher than the amount of lead thrown by shorter but more intense training (cycling) (values ​​measured in blood). So, according to this study, sweating for a longer period of time may be more advantageous than sweating at the same (or more?) rate over a shorter period of time.

Cadmium:

  • In Canada, in the study I mentioned above, cadmium could be detected in all samples, including blood, urine and sweat, in only three of the participants, while cadmium was detected in the sweat of 17. So sweat can be a good method for detecting cadmium. Considering the average amounts detected, it is seen that cadmium is excreted better with sweat than other ways. Average amounts in blood, urine and sweat, respectively: 0.03, 0.28, 5.7 mcg/L.
  • In the study in which 28 lecturers volunteered in the USA, the amount of cadmium detected in sweat ranged from 11-200mcg/L, while it was between 0-67mcg/L in urine. There is no such thing as too much cadmium in the urine of those who have too much cadmium in their sweat. From this, we can conclude that a urine test performed alone does not always reflect the situation in the body.

Arsenic:

  • They compared a group in Bangladesh who had arsenic poisoning and showed skin symptoms, another group exposed to arsenic in drinking water, and a third group who had never been exposed to arsenic. As expected, the sweat arsenic content of those exposed to arsenic was several times higher than those that were not exposed. There was no difference between the arsenic poisoning group and those who received arsenic from drinking water. I wondered if there is a maximum amount of arsenic that can be excreted in sweat, or if the arsenic taken with drinking water is too high, perhaps because it spreads for a long time, although it does not cause skin symptoms… seen to be thrown. This shows that, as with other heavy metals, our need for these vitamins and minerals increases with arsenic toxicity.
  • Again, in the Canadian study, arsenic was detected in 17 of the 20 participants. This time, the most arsenic was measured in the urine. (Average amounts are 37mcg/L, 3.1mcg/L, 2.5mcg/L in urine, sweat and blood, respectively)

I think we can draw two important conclusions from these findings:

First; Routinely practicing sweating through exercise, sauna or other means can reduce the body’s heavy metal load more than we think over time. As I said at the beginning of the article, we say “Sweating removes toxins,” but when we suspect heavy metals, the first detox method that comes to mind is usually taking chelation agents or supplements. I can’t compare the amount of metal excreted with these agents with the amount excreted through sweat, but even the mildest and the most herbal ones can have side effects. Therefore, sweating seems like a safer method to me compared to trying to get rid of the heavy metal accumulated in the tissue into the blood. As I said, I can’t compare their effectiveness, but I think that at least applying it in addition to other methods can speed things up.

The second conclusion we can draw is that sweat tests may be a new alternative to blood and urine tests, which generally do not work very well in measuring body accumulation. There are other tests such as hair, erythrocyte, intracellular spectrophotometer analyzes (oligoscan, zell-check) used to measure this load. Although hair tests are found to be more reliable than urine and blood, sometimes they may not reflect the situation directly and it may be necessary to interpret the mineral ratios. Zell-check, on the other hand, although it is a very practical test, is criticized by some researchers as inaccurate (5) (6). In short, a method that everyone considers valid has not yet been found to fully understand the heavy metal load in the body. Therefore, measuring the amount in sweat can be another method we can apply.

If you can’t sweat…

Unless you have an inherited or acquired disorder that damages the sweat glands, skin or nerves, the inability to sweat may improve over time. It has been stated that sweating may become more difficult, especially in people who are exposed to toxins, since the autonomic nervous system’s ability to balance body temperature may decrease(2). In order to regulate this, correction of biochemical processes with the help of nutrition and food supplements, as well as methods to stimulate lymph drainage and exercise before sauna were recommended (2) . Examples of methods that stimulate lymph drainage are massage, dry brushing, trombone jumping, and all sorts of other exercises. Unless you’ve been a regular exerciser, don’t expect great results on your first workout. It has been observed that those who exercise regularly for a longer period of time sweat better. Therefore, it is necessary to give the body some time to adapt… And of course, drinking plenty of water is another trick for sweating. When you drink plenty of water and insist on exercising, you will gradually find that you can sweat more easily. Let me write as a small reminder that you should also pay attention to your diet in order to compensate for the increased mineral excretion when you sweat.

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