This book need not be read cover to cover or in any particular order. Figures and tables have been included to rapidly convey how the different symptoms are interrelated and how different medicines and nutritional supplements can be used.

This book is intentionally very broad. A large number of supplements and medicines are discussed. Thus there will be SOMETHING that each individual patient's metabolism tolerates, and SOMETHING that each physician is familiar and comfortable with.

This book gives you the options you need - you decide what to use.

This book discusses methods to diagnose and treat some of the physiological and metabolic dysfunctions which are a part of chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and environmental illness. Some of the information will be helpful even if mercury isn't the root of your problems.

The book is written as a straightforward reference book for you, not as super sophisticated research treatise for medical school professors. Everyday terms have been used when possible. Thus "low thyroid" instead of "hypothyroid," "poisoned" instead of "intoxicated," etc. Where medical words need to be used, they are explained.

Instead of a very long list of esoteric and obscure references, there is a short list of helpful and interesting books and papers that explains what they are so you can decide if they would help you. This book covers:

how to find and work with good doctors;

the effects of chronic mercury poisoning, and how mercury causes these effects;

how to diagnose chronic mercury poisoning;

how to treat chronic mercury poisoning;

scientific evidence that a lot of people are mercury poisoned.

This book is especially valuable because some physicians are not yet familiar with the diagnosis and treatment of chronic mercury poisoning. Their textbooks state that there is no suitable biological index for the amount of mercury in the target organ, the brain, but do not explain what tests to use in place of the old fashioned ones that miss 2 cases out of 3. Worse, the textbooks offer no guidance on how to cure chronic mercury poisoning or control symptoms during treatment. This book gives your physician the information they need to help you.

I was very lucky when I got sick. Not lucky to get sick! That was a terrible experience! But I was lucky to have received exactly the right education before I needed it - close enough to medicine to be able to read physician's textbooks, but not close enough to share all the myths and be sure of the things "everyone knows." I was lucky to have had some business experience so I viewed physicians as professional service providers and knew how to get the services I needed from them. I had the right political experience to realize I could get lots of valuable information by just talking to enough people, but that certain things had to be learned by reading books.

I didn't only learn how to get better. I also learned how much people suffer from this terrible condition. I learned how poorly understood mercury poisoning is. I wrote this book so that other people don't have to do all their own detective work when they get sick. So that people could start with the best information I could find. So that future victims of mercury poisoning won't have to suffer unnecessarily because nobody really knows what to do. I wrote this book to help you get well.

Sometimes it takes the doctors a while to figure out what is causing a disease. Until recently it was believed that ulcers were entirely psychosomatic. Ulcer sufferers underwent prolonged treatment, were seldom cured, and often ended up under the surgeon's knife. It is now known that most ulcers are due to helicobacter pylorii infection, and ulcers easily cured.

Lyme disease is a fascinating story. A housewife fell ill. Her symptoms were considered psychosomatic. When her husband and children came down with similar problems, this was regarded as some kind of projection of her psychosomatic complaint. She was eventually able to convince a physician that the only crazy thing was assuming that something psychosomatic could be contagious! Once the doctor gave them medicine they got better.

Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome is still routinely considered a psychiatric disorder despite the repeated publication of physical and laboratory abnormalities always found in victims of it. People who realize it's not "Yuppie flu" find treatments that help them get better. A lot of these are covered in this book since CFIDS is often caused by unrecognized mercury poisoning and I had a terrible time with it.

In less recent times, another form of mercury poisoning - acrodynia, or pink disease in babies - was endemic for 150 years until physicians recognized mercury as the causal agent. The disease was eliminated and all the babies got better by changing the formulation of infant care products that used to include mercury.

This book is the kind of book you'd expect a chemist to write - one that is mechanistic, interrelated, and views the body as a complex chemical factory to be measured and controlled by adding a bit of the right reagent over here, taking something out over there, and sprinkling on "magic pixie dust" where needed. This isn't the only way to understand things. It is just the way I knew how to explain them.

Progress in medicine is sometimes slow due to people's natural tendency to hold on to the old theories they learned in school. Medical school professors can be a bit dogmatic about the need to adhere to the theories they lecture on so authoritatively. It takes a while for what ordinary doctors see day after day in their clinics to get applied creatively to making people better, and even longer for this information to make it back into medical school lectures. I hope I have given you the best of both worlds in this book - a description of what actually happens to real people when they encounter mercury, instead of the theoretical response the average man is projected to have from what happens to little mice and rats in medical school experiments.

AMALGAM ILLNESS: DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT
What you can do to get better
How your doctor can help

- Find out if you have a mercury problem
- Find out what you can do about it
- Find out how to get well!

This is not the first time in the history of modern medicine that a very obvious disease was belittled and ignored. Until recently it was believed that ulcers were entirely psychosomatic. Ulcer sufferers underwent prolonged treatment, were seldom cured, and often ended up under the surgeon's knife. After years of intense criticism and ridicule - about 20 years after the research was published - it has finally been accepted that most ulcers are due to helicobacter pylorii infection which can be easily cured with appropriate antibiotic therapy. At least by the medical schools and licensing boards. Yet it is still common to find physicians who still treat ulcers by prescribing acid suppressors - as if they resulted from too much stomach acid.

Cholesterol was held out as the root cause of atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease for about 30 years during which the correct evidence that elevated homocysteine played a major role was ridiculed and ignored.

Older physicians still remember when "there was no such thing as Epstein Barr Virus (mononucleosis)."

And who can forget Lyme disease? A housewife fell ill. Her arthritis and other symptoms were diagnosed as psychosomatic. When her husband and children came down with similar symptoms, this was regarded as some kind of projection of her psychosomatic complaint. She was eventually able to convince physicians that the only crazy thing was assuming that something psychosomatic could be contagious!

Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome is still routinely considered a psychiatric disorder despite the repeated publication of physical and laboratory abnormalities always found in victims of it. When it can no longer be ignored, it is dismissed with a bit of namecalling - "Yuppie flu."