Many humans love to play with fire. Such a pyromaniac started a monstrous fire three years ago that fortunately didn’t burn down my lovely mountain home and retirement villa atop my garage. The human race is also playing with a different type of fire that is environmentally induced. The title to this month’s article was also the subject of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine’s/AAEM’s October conference. AAEM agrees with me that humans are actively destroying our wonderful planet’s ecosystem. Fortunately, they also attempt to educate their members more thoroughly on this large topic through their conferences, attempting to counteract society’s detrimental environmental effects on their patients.

First, who exactly is the AAEM. This is directly from their website:

The American Academy of Environmental Medicine was founded in 1965 and is an international association of physicians and other professionals interested in the clinical aspects of humans and their environment.

The Academy is interested in expanding the knowledge of interactions between human individuals and their environment, as these may be demonstrated to be reflected in their total health. The AAEM provides research and education in the recognition, treatment and prevention of illnesses induced by exposures to biological and chemical agents encountered in air, food, and water.¹

Next, why even be concerned with environmental pollution. Our politicians, especially our present president, don’t appear to be. The following is from AAEM’s promo for this conference: “According to the EPA, more than three and a half billion pounds of toxic chemicals are released each year directly into the environment. One to two billion pounds of pesticides are used each year in the United States alone. These chemicals are now ubiquitous in our air, water, food, home and workplaces.”²

In 2015, environmentally induced diseases were responsible for 9 million premature deaths, that is 16% of all global death. Exposure to contaminated air, water, and soil kill more people than war, AIDS, hunger, or smoking.²

Environmental pollution has been associated with respiratory and immune system diseases, development or exacerbation of cardiovascular diseases, impairment of intellectual and motor skill development in children, recurrent infections, development of type 2 diabetes, brain degenerative disorders, the increase of some cancers, and greater all-cause mortality. The health implications of long-term exposure to low levels of these compounds are not well understood by the medical community. Environmental medicine physicians have a superior ability to help their patients reduce the harmful effects of environmental factors, and this ability should be shared and underscored in every healthcare practice. Pollution is the world’s largest environmental threat to health.² 

With me, they are preaching to the choir. I graduated from the University of California Davis in 1975 with a degree in biology whose focus was ecology. I also helped start the campus recycling program and helped to dramatically expand the campus community food garden. Unfortunately, capitalism doesn’t care a whit about people or their environment, only about maximizing profits. AAEM’s group of physicians and other health care professionals are interested in educating their members in the various aspects of environmentally triggered illnesses and cost-effective ways to understand, diagnose, treat, and prevent these disorders. Their members can then return to their clinics and begin educating the public in general. Optimally, this will trigger a tsunami of environmental education that can begin to transform the way Americans actually contemplate their day-to-day effects on the environment and how their environment can positively or negatively affect them in return.

There were three days of educationally stimulating talks, so I will concentrate on the ones I found most interesting, which of course doesn’t mean the ones I don’t cover weren’t. Apologies to the speakers I didn’t cover.

The first talk on Friday, 23^rd October, was “Environmental Contaminants and their Association with Chronic Infectious Diseases, Diagnostic Management and Treatment Difficulty” by Pilar Munoz-Calero, MD, who works and lives in Spain and has organized nine international congresses of environmental medicine there. She emphasized a very important point: The failures in the treatment of new pathologies appear to be the result of overemphasizing the actual symptoms but not paying special attention to the causes of these novel diseases.

She showed in her lecture that there is a direct relationship between environmental xenobiotics—such as heavy metals/volatile organic compounds/electromagnetic radiation/etc., which weaken the immune system tremendously—and various autoimmune diseases and allergies. These diseases and allergies weaken the human body to the point where it is more vulnerable to the effects of pathogenic microorganisms. This creates the internal terrain for chronic, subtle, infections like Epstein Barr and Lyme’s to gain a foothold and eventually disable the individual. To effectively treat this type of patient, she says you must return to the original bodily insult and reduce the toxic load before beginning to try to eliminate the microorganisms. This is also the method by which Eric Gordon, MD, treats his chronic tick-borne disease patients.

Another talk that caught my eye was “Principles of Hormone Action Apply to Environmental Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals/EDC’s” by Frederick vom Saal, PhD. He apparently was way ahead of his time, as he initially recognized problems with EDC’s in the early 1990s. He composed a very thorough list of our daily exposures to EDC’s and multiple examples in each category + a list of Steroidal and Xenobiotic Estrogens.

Dr. Saal had some very interesting conclusions. One important takeaway was that very small changes in hormones during embryonic development can have life-long consequences on the expression of genes. He cited evidence that early EDC exposure will result in epigenetic changes that can lead to metabolic alterations, which will segue into various adult chronic diseases. For me, this is probably the most important information regarding the environment: its effect on fetal development. Just think how hard it is to go from one cell to an approximately 30-foot long GI tract with its various accessory glands, a four-chambered heart where all the valves open and close in a coordinated fashion to effectively pump blood, etc. This is one of the real miracles in life. To damage someone before they even have a chance to draw a breath is tantamount to the worst mortal sin I was taught in Catholic school. Everybody deserves to exit their mother in as perfect a shape as possible!

Next up was “Reducing Risk of Cancer from Exposure To Smoke: An Action Plan For Firefighters, First Responders, Residents Exposed To Wildfire” by Louise Tolzmann, ND. I thought this was a very important talk because whole communities like Paradise, California, and Talent, Oregon, are being consumed by infernos of fire. It isn’t just trees and bushes that are being incinerated. She displayed a comprehensive list of toxic substances emitted by these fires:

• Toxic Gases (CO2; CO; NOx; SOx; ozone)
• Solvents and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (benzene, styrene, toluene, PAHs)
• Toxic Metals (lead, arsenic, cadmium, copper, mercury)
• Herbicides and Pesticides
• Perfluoronated Compounds
• Plastics
• PCB’s/Asbestos
• Over 100 different chemicals produced from incomplete combustion of  organic matter (coal, oil, gas, garbage, trees).

The above is a veritable who’s who of substances that you do not want to inhale, ingest, or have absorbed transdermally. In addition, there are ample amounts of extremely tiny particulate matter that become air born, especially PM 2.5, which are particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, and PM Ultrafine, which are ultrafine or nanoparticles that are between 1 and 100 nanometers in size. These are the truly scary-sized molecules because they evade capture by the cilia in your larger airways and can then reach the end of your respiratory train line: the alveoli. Especially the ultrafine particles can cross the respiratory membrane in the alveoli, enter the blood stream, and translocate to all organs and parts of our bodies. They have been linked to numerous pathological conditions but especially diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and low birth weight.

On a different note, Steve Tower, MD, presented “Arthroprosthetic Cobaltism: A Commonly Overlooked Iatrogenic Toxin.” There was a phenomenal House episode several years ago where a woman with seemingly unrelated severe symptoms was finally diagnosed with cobalt poisoning from a joint replacement. My take on this is how many joint replacement patients have mild to moderate symptoms that are just being dismissed as normal aging or hypersensitivity? A good history will pick up history of a joint replacement. You wouldn’t have to be as diligent as House to order testing to confirm mild to moderate cobalt poisoning or not.

Dr. Tower also seemed to have a review of studies proving the efficacy of chelation therapy at his fingertips. My recommendation was that he start hiring himself out as a professional witness to help other doctors whose medical boards were stymieing their use of chelation. I think he would be perfect!

Chelation was a popular topic on Saturday. One talk was “Toxic Metals, Health Effects and Use of Calcium EDTA and DMPS for Treatment” by Jeffrey A. Morrison, MD, CNS. The other was “How Treating the Elephant in the Room Became a Black Swan Event: Lead and Cardiovascular Disease” by Gervasio A. Lamas, MD.

Dr. Morrison submitted excellent material, including the information that lead (Pb), cadmium (cd), and zinc (Zn) having higher binding constants than calcium and will therefore replace the calcium when they meet the Calcium-EDTA complex. For me this is excellent info because my provocative urine heavy metal testing showed high lead. Calcium EDTA is a quick push, not like a very slow sodium EDTA one.

Dr. Lamas entered a great quote in slide #3 of his lecture: “If you say there is an elephant in the room, you mean that there is an obvious problem or difficult situation that people do not want to talk about (but should).” Next slide, he had a great picture of that elephant covered with proven, vasculotoxic metals: lead and cadmium. He also comes to these conclusions concerning Pb and Cd from journal articles:

• Lead is associated with hypertension, stroke, MI, and mortality. Its principal storage is in bone. Once in bone, the half-life is 30 years.
• Cadmium is associated with coronary artery disease, cerebrovascular disease, and particularly peripheral artery disease. Its principal storage is in kidneys, liver, and lungs. The half-life is 30 years.
• Strong mechanistic and experimental evidence exist supporting vasculotoxic effects of Pb and Cd.^{3 4 5}

He then looked at other studies on chelation and heavy metals plus some incredible before and after chelation pictures of feet and toes with diabetic ulcers that made my wife leave the room. Finally, he asks the question, “Why has it taken so long?”—meaning so long to recognize the efficacy of chelation. His answer was a quote from Marlon Brando in the movie Godfather: “It’s not personal, it’s business.”

Finally, at the Q & A session on Saturday afternoon, I had an extremely odd question posed to me: Dr. Cross, do you not believe in the Black Lives Matter Movement? I was slightly taken aback and initially came back with what I believe: all lives are important. Then my cognitive dexterity fortunately kicked in. I subsequently said that poor black lives don’t matter, nor do poor Hispanic ones, or poor white ones, or poor red ones, or even poor green ones—if there happen to be Martians living somewhere disguised as humans living in poverty. St. John’s Parish, west of New Orleans and predominantly black, had in 2019 the highest cancer risk from airborne pollutants in the US due to various chemical plants in the area brazenly releasing hazardous chemicals.⁶ A similar story repeats itself around the US and the world. Corporations mostly place their polluting factories closer to poor communities, which leads to the above scenario. What these greedy people don’t understand is that wind and water are the great equalizers. They may not be exposed to the same concentrations as places like St. John’s Parish, but wind and water still bring the pollution eventually to their doorsteps.

So, let me end this article with an incredibly prescient quote from the indomitable Rachel Carson which, to me, terrifically conveys the elephant in the proverbial environmental room: The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature, but of ourselves.⁷

References

1. https://www.aaemonline.org/aboutus.php
2. http://www.aaemconference.com/fall/congress.php
3. Cosselman et al. Nat Rev Cardiol. 2015;12:627-42.
4. Menke et al. Circulation. 2006;114:1388-94.
5. Navas-Acien et al. Environ Health Perspect. 2007;115:472-82.
6. https://www.nola.com/news/environment/article_c4bfd6e3-3f1f-5e3f-9816-b3508b680671.html
7. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/425064-the-human-race-is-challenged-more-than-ever-before-to