@Omega you mention "Copper toxicity causing a deficiency in bio available copper". With due respect I am sceptical that there is such a thing. Can you show me anything in scientific literature that mentions such a thing please.
https://coppertoxic.com/testing
In terms of copper - blood's homeostatic nature will ensure that excess copper is quickly removed from the blood, but this doesn't mean it magically disappears from the body. If a patient is being exposed to an immediate source of copper, such as a copper IUD, chances are the blood may show an elevated level. But once that IUD is removed (or the immediate source of exposure taken away), the blood will naturally return to normal, even though loads of toxic bio-unavailable copper is now stored in the body's tissues. In fact, we might even see the blood serum level of copper being low in a copper toxic person. If copper has accumulated and is tightly stored in the tissues, and adrenal function is too weak to mobilize that stored copper, it's not going to show up in the blood!
With this background, why on earth are so many practitioners still so reliant on the mineral level that shows up in the blood, without ever stopping to examine the tissue level? As a direct result of such practice, misdiagnosis runs rampant, and the lack of awareness to copper toxicity simply persists. Not only is such tunnel vision ignorant and irresponsible, but also dangerous, and as long as people continue to focus on serum blood results, the mass confusion surrounding this epidemic will only continue. There are so-called 'experts' online who are so focused on blood test results, and their trusting audience then spends a fortune in time and money getting all the suggested blood panel lab tests - serum this, plasma that, ceruloplasmin - only to discover even more confusion as they try to interpret the results, once again ignoring that copper excess is stored in tissue, not blood. Blood is certainly invaluable for many markers of disease and health conditions, but NOT when it comes to measuring mineral status! At best, if the timing is right, a blood test may catch copper toxicity, but certainly far more often than not it will miss it. Copper toxic individuals very often receive blood tests results that show 'normal' and are falsely diagnosed as 'healthy'. As Dr. Eck points out, "If you have high levels of a certain mineral, like copper, held tightly in storage, why on earth would you expect the copper to show up in the blood - unless it is being released?!"
Copper needs to be bound to a transporter protein (either ceruloplasmin or metallothionein), otherwise it becomes bio-unavailable, does not enter the cell where it needs to be, and instead gets accumulated in a bio-unavailable form in the body's tissues. The problem again with the standard blood serum testing procedure is that it ignores not only the accumulated bio-unavailable copper stored in the tissues, it also ignores the copper content within the cells. The following quote is by Dr. Carolyn Dean, MD, ND speaking about the inadequacy of serum tests. While in the quote she is referring to magnesium, the same is very much true for copper: "A serum test for magnesium is actually worse than ineffective, because a test result that is within normal limits lends a false sense of security about the status of the mineral in the body. It also explains why doctors don't recognize magnesium deficiency; they assume serum magnesium levels are an accurate measure of all the magnesium in the body."
A urine test on the other hand shows what the body is excreting. When the body is excreting copper, then elevated copper levels will show on a urine test. If the urinalysis is performed during this time of excretion, it will catch the copper toxicity problem, and it can also be useful for showing how much copper (or any mineral/metal) is being excreted. But once again, what is being excreted is very different from what is being STORED. The stored copper is NOT being excreted, rather it is tightly stored in various organs and soft tissue of the body, particular the liver and the brain, yet won't show up in a urine test. Even urine challenge testing usually only reaches superficial areas of toxicities and can miss much of the tightly stored copper. Not only that, but chelation can also stir up and redeposit toxins in vital organs, while also being excessively hard on the kidneys (since this method forces toxins out through the kidneys rather than through the bile).
he central issue of copper toxicity is stored copper in the cells and tissues. If we want to know the stored tissue level, blood tests and urine tests certainly aren't the answer (though they may in some cases be useful as a secondary source of information if you suspect copper toxicity or are on a detoxing program). Of course one could do a liver biopsy which would provide excellent evidence of tissue levels, however being both expensive and invasive it is not a viable or realistic option for most. Hair, however, being a form of soft tissue, provides a great window into what is happening inside the body at the tissue level.
As copper passes through the blood, either to be utilized, excreted, or stored, it gets picked up in the hair follicle. An inch or so of hair taken closest to the scalp provides approximately a three-month window into the mineral and metal status of the body. As such, it is not prone to the hour to hour fluctuations that affect the blood reading. More importantly, the hair reflects the tissue level, which is what we want to know in terms of our minerals status. Another major advantage that Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis offers is data on the key ratios between mineral pairs as determined through the exhaustive research in the 1970s and 80s by Dr Eck and Dr Watts, the pioneers of the Science of Nutritional Balancing. When it comes to rebalancing minerals, or assessing mineral status, looking at any one mineral level in isolation explains very little. Take magnesium, for example. If the hair chart shows high magnesium, is it really high? Not necessarily, as stress depletes magnesium and most people are magnesium deficient. However, if we look at the ratio between sodium and potassium, known as the stress ratio, and we see a high Na/K ratio, we know that the individual is under a lot of stress, and that the high magnesium level is representing an intracellular loss of magnesium which shows up high in the hair but indicates magnesium deficiency. This is just one example of the importance of looking at the bigger picture, and not just one mineral level in isolation. The same can be said for assessing the copper status. A copper toxic individual can have either high (overt) copper showing up in the hair, or he may have low (hidden / latent) copper. Hidden copper toxicity occurs when high levels of copper are stored in various body tissues but have not yet been released to show up in the hair. Therefore, we MUST look at what is happening with the other mineral levels and ratios in order to determine copper status...and the correction of copper. For example, when copper appears low in the HTMA, we can look at other key indicators such as a high calcium, low potassium, a Ca/K ratio over 10, low molybdenum (<.003), low Na/K, and a number of other levels and ratios to understand what may be happening with copper. This underscores the importance of the HTMA practitioner understanding these various markers, otherwise they could easily look at the low copper level and suggest the client needs to consume more, when in fact doing so would only compound the problem.
Edited by Omega 3 Snake Oil, 29 July 2018 - 12:56 AM.
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