August 9, 2018
It’s the iron, stupid
Originally published on How I Recovered
If you research either vitamin D or copper enough, you’re bound to come across Morley Robbins contrarian views eventually. I tend to listen to people who seem to have deep knowledge in tightly confined areas especially when they say everyone else is wrong. So about a year ago, I stopped trying to take vitamin D and stopped giving it to my family because of Morley Robbins.
Ray Pete’s writings convinced me to stop taking fish oil at some point. Not much happened when I stopped and I’ve since restarted the fish oil, albeit at much lower doses.
I don’t like feeling like the Lone Ranger so this year I consulted Rick Malter on my copper toxicity picture. Then for good measure I sought out Morley Robbins for a second opinion (my most recent HTMA on the right). Rick thought I was mostly on the right track but wanted me to be a little less aggressive with my copper detox because of the risk of cardiac arrest.
Morley Robbins had a very different opinion for me, saying “It’s the iron, stupid”. Okay, he didn’t say it exactly like that, but pretty close. I’m going to try to summarize his case here for my own benefit and maybe for yours. In a nutshell, my iron levels are double what they should be. This causes tremendous amount of oxidative stress in my body and most critically disables my liver preventing it from resolving other secondary toxicities.
“Think of your health problems as a Ferris wheel”, he says. Oh, but it’s not spelled Ferris, it’s Ferrous with ‘ous’. Your copper toxicity, heavy metal toxicity, tendonitis, fatigue etc are all represented by the chairs hanging on the wheel. The axle at the center of everything is your iron overload. Here’s what that looks like on my recent Labcorp test results:
There is some convincing science that iron accumulation is a very underappreciated problem. It seems to be highly correlated with degenerative brain function and disease and this has been proven by studies comparing men and women and postmenopausal women. What? You mean a woman’s menses protects her brain function? Yes.
The quickest thing you can do to start lowering high iron is to give blood. This is one point on which Dr. Cutler and Morley Robbins agree. Too bad you can only do it every eight weeks. I also found quite a few other ways to lower iron which I will go over further down.
One of those ways happens to be cholestyramine… what a coincidence since I started taking it regularly a week ago. And that got me thinking, it’s possible my CIRS diagnosis is actually not a mold thing. Maybe it’s the iron.
Out of curiosity I went back and looked at my old old blood test results and guess what? My ferritin jumped from 75 ng/mlL in 2004 to 141 in 2006. That just happens to be the time period in which I went over the cliff with my health. Coincidence? Note, the normal range according to Labcorp is 30-400. Morley says to ignore that because “those ranges are for healthy people”. Some say “as a rule 25-75ng/mL is an acceptable range for most”.
Continue reading at How I Recovered
