Bombshell: Explosive Medical Secrets That Will Redefine Aging (48 page)

The liver is a magnificent organ, but if it is so impenetrable, then
why is cancer about to be the biggest killer in the world, with liver cancer taking a spot in the top ten deadliest cancers? We can only ask so much of our livers and our kidneys. Toxins enter our bodies through our skin, lungs, or stomach. These intruders must eventually confront the liver, where they are detected and then usually dispatched in one of three ways: They are tucked away in the far reaches of the liver itself, sent on for elimination in the filtering system of the kidneys, or, as I wrote about in
Sexy Forever
, stored in the fat cells. It’s in the fat cells that many of the long-term problems arise.

Toxins in the fat cells make and keep you fat. The more toxins you take in, the more fat is needed to store them, thus the obesity epidemic. It’s not so much the volume of food, but the quality of the food that we take in that causes the problems. It’s called the
toxic burden
, and burden it is. Our bodies were never designed to protect themselves against this chemical onslaught. Our systems fail to process and remove most of the chemicals once they have entered our bodies, so the toxicity starts building up inside us. According to Paula Baillie-Hamilton, a British authority on the health effects of toxic chemicals, “Every single human on the face of this earth is now permanently contaminated with these modern synthetic chemicals.”

Imagine!

How did this happen?

When I was a kid there was a brand called Scotchgard. Everybody in my childhood had a can of Scotchgard in their house. It was a wondrous thing. My mother sprayed our furniture to protect it from stains. Our clothes were sprayed with it to protect against spills. It was fascinating stuff too; water would roll off it in little droplets. I loved to watch it and play with it.

But wait … it
was
too good to be true. How did Scotchgard end up accumulating in the body tissues of just about every human being on the planet and creating a huge health scare that continues to this day? Scotchgard is produced by the 3M Company as a stain-resistant coating for fabrics, leather, furniture, and carpets; its active ingredient, perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), even found its way into the packaging of processed foods and fast foods. Its residues began turning up in the blood of the general population and in wildlife as early as 1976, and in 1983, a long-term study of PFOS in rats found that it stimulated the growth of cancer, particularly
liver
tumors. Amazingly, it wasn’t taken off the market.

By 1999, the CDC had begun to monitor the effects of this chemical
and found that it had been detected in the blood of most people everywhere from the United States to Sweden. Tests showed that it stayed in the bloodstreams of humans for up to four years. Finally, in May 2000, under pressure from the EPA, this PFOS ingredient was phased out of 3M products. But the damage had been done. And what about the effects of combining all the other chemicals we are knowingly and unknowingly accumulating? How do they react when mixed together?

Since 1950 skin melanoma is up 690 percent; prostate cancer, up 286 percent; thyroid cancer, up 258 percent; and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, up 249 percent. Liver cancer is up 234 percent and growing; kidney and renal cancers are up 182 percent. Connect the dots.

I’m not trying to discourage you. This is, after all, a book to redefine aging, a way to live longer and healthier, without disease. Yet it seems the odds are stacked against us, and sadly, yes, the odds of escaping contamination are impossible, but—and this is the big but—there is a new specialty arising from necessity and it is called
environmental medicine
, or as I call it,
survival medicine
!

If you are not feeling well; if you are old before your time; if you are fearful of cancer and other diseases; if you suspect you are carrying a toxic burden because you have used and consumed products all your life you thought were safe; if you suspect or know you have mold, or bacteria, or gut issues that no doctor seems to know how to tackle; if you have unexplained aches, pains, painful joints, headaches, constipation, or colon problems—then environmental medicine could be your answer.

The job of the environmental doctor is to rid you of chemicals, molds, toxins, and contaminants.

This is a Bombshell!

Doctors who specialize in environmental medicine are in a rapidly expanding field. In addition to Dr. William Rea, whom you’ll hear
from here, two others I’ve found are Dr. Rick Sponaugle, founder and medical director of Florida Detox and Wellness Institute, and Dr. Robin Bernhoft of Brentwood, California, in the L.A. area. These doctors have dedicated their lives to the detoxification of environmental toxins, including mold. (For more information on Dr. Sponaugle and a bonus chapter, go to my website,
www.suzannesomers.com
, and click on my blog.) As I vet more environmental medicine doctors, I will list them in my blog. Most antiaging doctors specialize in detoxification. Dr. Rea and the others I mention take the “last resort” patients, those so sensitive to chemicals that their lives are threatened.

But right now, I introduce you to Dr. Bill Rea, one of the original pioneers in environmental medicine. The doors at his Dallas, Texas, clinic have been open for thirty-five years, and more than thirty thousand patients have come to him from all over the world when no other medical protocols have worked.

Dr. William Rea
founded the Environmental Health Center in Dallas, Texas, where he offers an innovative, nontoxic approach to solving human health problems that are related to environmental pollutant exposure, including chemical and electromagnetic sensitivity. The center is considered by many people to be pioneering, and Dr. Rea is a recognized world authority on the manipulation of the patient’s environment. As I said above, Dr. Rea has treated more than thirty thousand environmentally sensitive patients with his innovative techniques
.

SS:
Hello, Dr. Rea. You are an environmental doctor located in Dallas, Texas. What is your definition of environmental medicine?

WR:
Thank you, Suzanne. Environmental medicine understands that a toxic accumulation gathers in the human body from the air we breathe, the water we drink, bacteria, viruses, chemicals, mold toxins, and exposure from electromagnetic fields such as cell phones and technology. We environmental doctors determine what the individual toxic load is in each patient and work to detoxify these harmful toxins and get them out of the body.

SS:
I find it very hopeful that you
can
clean the body of toxins.

WR:
We can tell what is or is not in the blood, but it’s more difficult in the tissues. To determine the amount of toxins in the tissues requires biopsies. We have breath analysis that can determine the amounts of over a thousand chemicals in the body. In the years I’ve been doing this, we have patients who have been treated with our protocols and appear to have none to very few toxins left in them after they change their lives and their environments.

SS:
Lucky people. But even though you are able to clean out a patient using time, diligence, and patience, do you feel that we are constantly being reintoxicated?

WR:
Unfortunately, you are going to have to breathe and drink water and eat food, and even if it is organic, you are still going to get some exposure. It’s frustrating. That’s why these changes we make have to become a way of life.

SS:
I just came back from New York and I laughed to myself that you never see a bug in a hotel anymore, and you can’t open a window.

WR:
You could take aluminum foil with you, which is nearly 100 percent impervious to most toxic chemicals. You put it over the mattress and therefore “wall off” the toxins; you can even put the aluminum around the floors. Now these are for extreme cases. If you go to my website, you will see that for some people who have such a toxic load, they are virtually horribly allergic to everything. It makes their lives miserable.

SS:
Are you joking? Aluminum on your bed and on the floors? Is it that bad out there?

WR:
This is in extreme cases, but, yes, it’s awful. You can get a breath analysis of a thousand chemicals and every time, a new one crops up. It can drive you crazy.

SS:
But isn’t our government keeping us safe?

WR:
Suzanne, you’ve been around long enough to know that answer.

SS:
Sorry, just playing devil’s advocate.

WR:
The human race is the most resilient on this planet, along with the cockroaches; otherwise we wouldn’t have seven billion people. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean we have seven billion
functioning
people. And how many people have good brain function? How many have good energy? Aches, pains, joints—you can go down the list—heart disease, cancer, and more; these are all usually environmentally induced.

SS:
But when you talk about it, people get overwhelmed.

WR:
I know, their eyes glaze over. So what we focus on are the informed people who really want to know about it, and those who want to be well.

SS:
Who comes to your clinic?

WR:
I get everybody’s failures … people from all over the world, from all continents, who have their backs up against the wall. They’ve
tried every protocol and they have failed, and now they are nonfunctional.

SS:
Is there an age range?

WR:
Not really; we usually see from twenty- to fifty-year-olds. But it can be any age, even kids and teenagers. The older ones also come, but they are generally not as informed and usually have a tendency to go to what they understand in orthodox medicine.

SS:
So you treat those who have been on the planet long enough for their toxic burden to have reached critical mass?

WR:
Yes, exactly; they have maxed out. There are four or five areas of the brain in addition to the GI tract (which is where you get the food sensitivities), and if those areas get off a little where the olfactory tract goes right up into the brain, it’s like a sensor and a computer and then these toxins in the brain are devastating.

We found with people coming to us from Mexico City, where they are breathing in all those toxins, that unfortunately these toxins come right up through people’s olfactory tract, and as a result they are getting Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and nonspecific neuropathy. Mexico City is number one in the world for pollution, although Shanghai is coming up on them. Some experts also found these toxins in kids from Mexico City who were in accidents, as well as finding them in wild dogs running around Mexico City. So every living thing in that area is breathing in these poisons, and the kids and animals have less resistance to them.

SS:
My granddaughter has severe food intolerances. She is allergic, it seems, to just about everything.

WR:
Well, that’s how I got into this specialty; my oldest son almost died from food intolerances. He was allergic to about thirty of the most common foods—milk, beef, wheat, dairy, eggs, you name it. The intolerance causes terrible yeast infections, migraines, vomiting, diarrhea, and stomach issues. This is all classic; it’s called
neurovascular injury
, which is nerve and blood vessel injury caused by breathing and eating these foods. Maybe children are not getting it at home, but they are getting exposed at school. Some kids are more receptive than others. I went to my grandkids’ school and the smell of natural gas knocked me over. It was from their stoves in the kitchen. Something had gone wrong with their ventilation system and they hadn’t gotten around to fixing it, but if a kid is sensitive, this is a big problem. Then there are the cleaning solutions they use at school; none of the schools are using organics, plus they spray for bugs, and
in addition, most people use toxic chemicals in their homes to clean so it is quite pervasive.