Posted on 08/25/2005 5:34:21 AM PDT by Born Conservative
A 5-year-old autistic boy died Tuesday in a Butler County doctor's office while undergoing an increasingly popular though controversial medical treatment touted by some as a cure for the lifelong neurological and developmental disorder.
Abubakar Tariq Nadama died while receiving chelation therapy, an intravenous injection of a synthetic amino acid that latches onto heavy metals and is then passed in the urine.
State police at Butler are investigating Nadama's death, which occurred at about 10:50 a.m. Tuesday in the office of Dr. Roy Eugene Kerry in Portersville.
Authorities said Kerry's office reported that the child was receiving an IV treatment for lead poisoning when he went into cardiac arrest.
The boy was being treated with EDTA, or ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid, which has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use only after blood tests confirm acute heavy-metal poisoning.
Exposure to heavy metals, especially mercury, has been linked by some researchers as a contributing cause to autism. Removing those metals, they believe, can improve a child's condition. The theory is a matter of dispute among scientists and within the autism community.
A family friend said the boy and his mother, Marwa, who are from England, moved here in the spring, specifically to receive chelation therapy, and were living in Monroeville.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
How sad, I hope that the death had nothing to do with the treatment, but there are some bad practitioners out there.
Follow up ping.
Chelation therapy is quackery, pure and simple, as far as I can tell.
Well, maybe you should look further.
Chelation is a well established medical solution to Heavy metal poisoning, and has been for over 40 years.
Oh, for heavy metal poisoning, chelation makes a lot of sense. That is what the therapy was developed for, after all. But the use of chelation for autism is what I would call quackery.
IV chelation for lead poisoning is well established; its been used for over 50 years. The theory that mercury is responsible for autism needs more proof. During IV chelation it is crucial to monitor electrolytes. The EDTA combines with calcium, potassium, etc. and an imbalance can lead to cardiac arrest. Oral chelation is cheaper and safer. I have been using small doses of oral EDTA for several years to remove heavy metals from my body. Since good metals, e.g., selenium, are also removed, I take a broad mineral supplement, Vitamin Research Products Advanced Essential Minerals.
More information in this article. Not much though.
Several important points in this article: the child died of cardiac arrest during the infusion (side effect of the med vs. electrolyte imbalance vs. ???), EDTA is only approved for treatment of confirmed acute heavy metal toxicity, and the physician treating the child is an ear nose and throat doctor (yep; bet he knows a lot about autism).
Of course, the real question is, did the patient actually have high levels of heavy metals in the bloodstream.
From what I have seen, practitioners use the symptom of autism to demonstrate heavy metal toxicity, so the actual observed levels of heavy metals in the bloodstream are irrelevant. The treatment is prescribed to treat the symptom, not the levels of heavy metals.
Darth did a blood test show heavy metals in your blood?
Is there a noticeable difference in your health since taking
the EDTA?
No test. I started taking EDTA to remove calcium deposits from my arteries. Since I owned an electroplating shop, I am sure to have absorbed lead, cadmium, and mercury in some amounts. I believe that almost everyone can benefit from oral chelation. It just has to be done slowly and carefully.
I know several people who have gone to Dr. Miranda, the Greensburg physician mentioned in the article. He specializes in holistic treatments and alternative medicine. The family was living in Monroeville, which is a lot closer to Greensburg than Portersville, where the other doctor is from. It's sad that the mother didn't take her child to Dr. Miranda. He would probably still be alive if he received the oral chelation instead of the IV treatment.
He would probably still be alive if the physician wasn't using a quack method for treating autism. The article says that EDTA is FDA approved for acute toxicity of PROVEN heavy metal toxicity. I'd bet that the child did NOT have any lab work proving elevated levels of a particular heavy metal.
You're absolutely right. Both of the doctors mentioned in the article are MDs and could've easily ordered lab tests to check for heavy metal toxicity. I suspect that most autistic children don't really have high levels of heavy metals to detect in a blood test and that these doctors use chelation regardless of what blood tests would indicate.
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