January 2013
Dear Friends,
As the new year rolls around most people are thinking about their health I’d like to put a twist on that and discuss a healthy medical treatment that we seldom utilize. Chelation Therapy.
I’ll tell you a brief story of how chelation therapy positively effected my family. In 1994 my mother was to have angioplasty performed on three diseased arteries, but an unskilled doctor ruptured an artery in the process. Following the botched procedure she was only strong enough to sustain the replacement of two of the three diseased arteries. A year following all of these invasive medical procedures she still had the same problem, her third artery was found to be 95% blocked.
In a very caviler manner the hospital staff began making plans for her bypass surgery when she put the brakes on it in NO uncertain terms, stating that, “I will never go through that again and no one could make me!” In the year since her bypass she had lost 50% use of her left hand and was experiencing panic attacks. So I sat with her on her hospital bed as she was being discharged and listened to the Dr. say, “Mrs. Yesthal, if I discharge you now you will be back here in cardiac distress, you will have a heart attack. It might be 6 hours or you might make it to 6 weeks but you will be back and you will need a bypass, but the odds won’t be in your favor if you are in cardiac distress.”
My brother and I were very concerned but we had to respect Mom’s wishes. Luckily we were not out of options. In the year since her bypass I had been doing research on alternative treatments to the bypass. One that really sparked my interest was Chelation therapy.
Chelation Therapy is a mainstream treatment used to treat heavy metal poisoning. However, it has also been used as an alternative therapy to treat heart disease, cancer, and other conditions. It most often involves the intravenous injection of ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid (EDTA), a synthetic amino acid that binds, or chelates with heavy metals, including iron, lead, mercury, cadmium, and zinc and then expels them from the body.
We found a local doctor who offered this therapy and signed Mom up right away; we wasted no time as we were hyper conscious of the 6 hour to 6 week time frame stated by her doctor. Chelation Therapy isn’t covered by insurance so my brother and I pooled our resources to pay for it. At first Mom went once a week to receive a bag of intravenous Chelation, then once every two weeks, then three weeks, until she got down to once a month. It took almost a year.
OUR MOM LIVED ANOTHER TEN YEARS! When she died in 2005, it had nothing to do with heart disease.
So what if you are healthy but are interested in chelating as a preventative therapy? CILANTRO! Cilantro is a natural chelator. This characteristic of cilantro was discovered quite by accident. When Dr. Yoshiaki Omura was studying diseases that hide and thrive in heavy metal environments, he noticed that his patients expelled an increased amount of mercury and other heavy metals in their urine after consuming a Vietnamese soup that was high in cilantro. Dr. Omura calls cilantro the “poor man’s Chelation Therapy”
Here is a delicious recipe: To use for Chelation, eat 2 tablespoons of cilantro pesto or ¼ cup fresh cilantro daily for 3 weeks
Cilantro Pesto
- 1 or 2 cloves garlic
- ½ cup sunflower seeds, cashews, or other nuts
- 1 cup packed fresh cilantro leaves
- 2 tablespoons lemon juice
- 6 tablespoons olive or flaxseed oil
– sea salt to taste
Put the cilantro and oil in blender or food processor and process until chopped. Add remaining ingredients and process to a lumpy paste. (You may need to add more oil) Scrape the sides of the blender to remove pesto and use some water to clean off the sides. You can change the consistency by altering the amount of olive oil and lemon juice, but keep the 3:1 ratio of oil to juice. (It freezes well, so you can make several batches at once.)
Love and Light, Lori
