Do You Need to Rid Your Body of Heavy Metals?
Wellness advocates say chelation works wonders. Doctors disagree. The truth may be somewhere in between.
When former NHL player Chris Tschupp was first diagnosed with ALS last year and given two to five years to live, he went on a search for answers beyond his neurologist’s office.
Tschupp traveled to Salt Lake City last fall to attend an alternative medicine conference on how to manage his incurable disease. That’s where he first heard about chelation therapy, a process where people take drugs that draw out heavy metals from the body. “Everyone [at the conference] says you should get tested for heavy metals and then remove them,” Tshupp says of chelation. “That’s a big thing with ALS, but I haven’t done it yet. I’m sorta on the fence.”
There’s currently no evidence that chelation therapy works for ALS, despite sectors of the wellness industry that claim it does. And ALS is just one of several conditions the procedure is being recommended for. A search on the website GoFundMe turns up dozens of results showing people raising money to try chelation to fix multiple ills, from Lyme disease to Alzheimer’s to autism. A federal report in 2016 found that roughly 60 million Americans spend around $30 billion per year on alternative therapies, including…
