Weekly Topics in Chiropractic Health
By Darrel Crain, D.C.
Are you mad for tuna? Do your fillings make you crazy? Are you getting stuck with more than the flu? The answer to these questions is held by Mercury, the swift messenger of the Roman gods, who kindly lent his name to the small planet orbiting closest to the sun. Mercury’s other namesake is the element mercury, recognized as the most toxic non-radioactive substance on our planet. Despite mercury’s rather significant dangers, people have found many uses for it over the years. Human fondness for using mercury brings to mind the old English saying about another Roman god, Neptune, god of the sea: “He who is shipwrecked the second time cannot lay the blame on Neptune.”
Likewise, we mustn’t blame Mercury for the contents of our tuna sandwich. “Make that toasted rye with lettuce and pickle, and hold the mercury!” Remember when you didn’t have to worry about industrial quicksilver in your favorite seafood dinner? Ah, those were the days. And remember that time you played with the mercury that spilled out of your mom’s broken thermometer? Admit it, you thought it was cool the way the little drops rolled downhill so fast! Unfortunately, mercury is a cumulative neurotoxin when it gets inside us. Seafood, “silver” dental fillings and mercury-laden vaccines rank as primary culprits for mercury poisoning.
Pregnant women are cautioned to limit their intake of tuna and certain other seafood because of dangerous mercury levels. “There’s no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another,” commented E.B. White. Mercury is released into the environment through trash incineration, coal-burning power plants, paints, dyes, electronics, fluorescent lights and plastics. Plankton ingest the mercury, small fish eat the plankton, and big fish eat the small fish. Older fish higher up the food chain have the greatest concentration of mercury. Pregnant women, nursing mothers and young children are all advised to avoid eating shark, swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish, according to federal government guidelines. Some experts argue that following these rules may still expose newborns to dangerously high mercury levels.
“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it’s just possible you haven’t grasped the situation,” wrote Jean Kerr. We might add, “or you have not been exposed to a sufficient quantity of mercury.” The Mad Hatter provides a good example. The process of hat-making once exposed “hatters” to mercurous nitrate for curing the animal fur to make felt. “Hatter’s shakes” was the name given to the serious neurological problems they developed, including uncontrollable muscular tremors, twitching limbs, distorted vision, confused speech, hallucinations and psychosis. The use of mercury in hat-making was finally banned in the United States in 1941.
Curiously, only ten years before that time, drug companies began adding mercury to vaccines using a compound called thimerosal as a preservative. Remarkably, the safety of this practice was based on a single study done by one researcher in the 1930s in which a handful of terminally-ill patients was given mercury-containing thimerosal. All the patients died, but hey, weren’t they dying already? This stunning example of meticulous scientific inquiry was all it took for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the drug companies to enthusiastically promote mercury as “safe and effective” for close to 70 years. A paper trail of internal drug company memos recently surfaced suggesting that scientists early on were well aware that any form of mercury injected into live human beings was a seriously bad idea.
In 1999, the FDA and medical authorities finally admitted that mercury should be removed from childhood vaccines. This was a commendable effort, after all, “A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday,” according to Jonathan Swift. One wonders why it took so long for our health leaders to admit their mistake. The allowable quantity of mercury was slashed from 88 micrograms down to three micrograms per year for a child receiving all recommended vaccines.
The admission that mercury had to go makes the new annual flu shot recommendation for pregnant women and babies very perplexing indeed. Each dose contains a whopping 25 micrograms of mercury! You may recall that the effect of flu vaccination on mortality rates after thirty years of widespread use is zero, contrary to what the powerful flu vaccine industry tells us. There is an old saying, “Good intentions are useless in the absence of common sense.” The only possible explanation for allowing even a single microgram more of mercury poisoning to occur was provided by the Cheshire Cat, when speaking to Alice after she fell down the rabbit hole. “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
Victor Hugo was right on the money when he noted, “Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers.” Mercury has seeped into our bodies in various ways, most of them unintentional, but some not. How can our government leaders keep a straight face when they tell pregnant women to worry about the mercury in their tuna, but not to worry about the mercury in the flu shot? You are not alone if you feel as though you have fallen down the rabbit hole with Alice. “”How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be, said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.””
Dr. Darrel Crain is a Family Chiropractor and Natural Health Writer practicing in San Diego, California. He is the President of the CCA San Diego County District and can be reached at 619-445-0100
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