Chris Kresser: I would be, I would guess the former rather than latter. Sometimes you see that when you improve detox, especially if you’re using urine because that’s the route that the body detoxifies some metals. So if you see an increase of metals in the urine, then that just tells you what’s happening with the detox capacity. And that’s why I’m not a huge fan of only using urine to test for metals because it doesn’t tell you what the body burden is. It tells you what’s coming out in the urine and those aren’t always the same.
One of the reasons I like the Quicksilver tri-test for mercury that Dr. Shade created, it tests hair, blood, and urine. And hair is the primary route of methylmercury excretion, urine is the primary route of inorganic mercury excretion, and so when we test all three of these together you can get the body burden of mercury which you learned from looking at serum levels of both organic and inorganic mercury. Then you can see how well the body’s detoxifying mercury by looking at the ratio between the blood and the urine mercury content and sometimes you’ll see high levels in the blood and lower or normal levels in the urine, and that tells you the patient’s not eliminating properly inorganic mercury. And then the same for methylmercury in the hair. If you see low normal levels in the hair but higher levels in the blood, then that tells you the patient’s not detoxifying methylmercury well.
So you get a lot more information. There’s also some questions I have about challenge testing and the validity of that which I covered in my podcast with Dr. Shade. So make sure to listen to that if you haven’t already. It’s a controversial area. I know that David Quig at Doctor’s Data feels strongly that challenge testing is necessary and a lot of other clinicians do as well. So we’ll cover that in detail more in a future course. But hopefully that’s enough to get you started.