The History of EDTA Chelation…Story of True Medical Progress
American medicine has produced life-saving therapies, and the early history of EDTA chelation therapy is a story that must be known. Although EDTA was used many years before, it wasn’t until the 1940s that it was introduced into the medical arena. Starting in World War 1, Professor R.A. Peters and his associates at Oxford University used a chelating compound called BAL (British Anti-Lewisite) to make arsenic from poison gases less harmful.
Miraculous Recoveries Began After Chelation
Dr. Clarke witnessed these miraculous recoveries and observed that, after chelation therapy, previously metal-contaminated tissues resumed normal function. He continued to be an avid proponent of chelation therapy and was largely responsible for generating scientific interest and keeping it alive during the first 20 years of its use. Dr. Clarke lived to be 92 years of age with a sharp mind and sustained interest in chelation therapy. Other doctors, realizing the merits of chelation therapy, had begun extensive clinical treatment programs in private hospitals. One such physician was H. Ray Evers, M.D. He and his staff administered chelation therapy to 3,000 patients over a six-year period at Columbia General Hospital. Dr. Evers observed that “from our experience in treating .patients with varying degrees of calcinosis (arteriosclerosis, atherosclerosis, etc.), we will unequivocably state that it is our opinion that every patient with this disease in any part of the body should be given a therapeutic trial before any type of vascular surgery is performed.
He also noted: “We find.in all cases of angina, characterized by the patient having no need for vasodilators after about the fifth infusion.and that ninety-one percent of these problems in the lower extremities make significant gains, including regaining ability to walk long distances comfortably, freedom from claudication, and evidence of improved distal circulation.”
Clinical trials testing EDTA’s benefits to the cardiovascular system were conducted by H. Richard Casdorph, M.D., Ph.D., assistant clinical professor of medicine at the medical school at University of California, Irvine.
In his book Bypassing Bypass Surgery, Elmer M. Cranton, M.D., reports that “Dr. Casdorph, utilizing sophisticated new noninvasive radioactive isotopes, demonstrated a statistically significant improvement of heart function and a highly significant increase in blood flow to the brain in patients with atherosclerosis. Precise measurements of cardiac injection fraction (the percentage of blood pumped from the large chamber of the heart with each contraction) were determined before and after chelation therapy. Similar isotope techniques were used to confirm increased blood flow in carotid arteries and in the brain itself following chelation. The statistical probability that measured improvement could have been due to pure chance was less than one in ten thousand.”
Other professionals engaged in similar studies included Drs. E. W. McDonagh, C.J. Randolph, and E. Cheraskin. The protocol consisted of measuring blood flow before and after EDTA chelation therapy, using the individual patients as their own controls. Dr. E.W. McDonagh and his colleagues used a unique brain blood flow study. They varied pressure on the eyeball to measure pressure of blood flow to the anterior of the eye. This is a valid test because the artery that promotes blood flow to the eye is connected to the carotid artery to the brain and blood pressure/flow within the eye corresponds to that in the brain. Again, patients were used as their own controls, and their blood pressure flow measurements were taken before and after EDTA administration. Results were very impressive.
It is important to note that these two studies, performed independently of each other, followed scientific protocol and supported the effectiveness of chelation therapy. Scientists find more credence in studies when their results are independently validated by separate facilities and researchers.
Advances and Accomplishments
In 1978, Dr. Evers, mentioned earlier was pulled into a legal battle to uphold the validation of chelation therapy. He won a court case that supported a doctor’s right to use a drug approved for one condition by the FDA to treat another condition for which its used has not been approved. An excerpt from the docket (United States vs. Evers, 453 F. Supp. 141 Cal.Rptr 764, 774).
Then, in 1978 the court ruled in favor of Dr. Evers, stating that;
“To require prior State approval before advising – prescribing – administering – a new treatment modality for an informed consenting patient is to suppress innovation by the person best qualified to make medical progress. The treating doctor, the clinician, is at the cutting edge of medical knowledge. The mention of a requirement that licensed doctors must prescribe, treat, ‘within State sanctioned alternatives’ raises the spectre of medical stagnation at the best, statism, paternalist big brother at worst. It is by the alternatives to orthodoxy that medical progress has been made. A free, progressive society has an enormous stake in recognising and protecting this right of the physician. Irrespective of the strange medical school of thought that chelation has not been clinically shown to help arteriosclerosis, the weight of the evidence submitted to this court is to the contrary.”
REFERENCES:
- Doll R, Fishbein L, Infante P, Landrigan P, Lloyd JW, Mason TJ, Mastromatteo E, Norseth T, et al. Problems of epidemiological evidence. Environ. Health Perspect. 1981;40:11- 20.
- Kazantzis G. Role of cobalt, iron, lead, manganese, mercury, platinum, selenium and titanium in carcinogenesis. Environ/ Health Perspect. 1981;40:143-161.
- “Smaller power sources on the horizon” by Sandeep Junnakar. Nov. 13, 2002. [http://CNET News.com; 6/26/2007].
- “Historical Perspectives on the Development of Chelation Therapies.” An Extended Compendium Prepared for the Advanced Training Seminar on Heavy Metal Toxicology. September 1998. Sponsored by the Great Lakes College of Medicine. Prepared by John Parks Trowbridge MD, FACAM, Diplomate ABCT.