About the Author

Dr. Andrew Cutler is a health care consultant in the Seattle area. He has a PhD in chemistry from Princeton, a BS in physics from the University of California, is a patent agent and a registered professional chemical engineer. His research has led to a number of publications in chemistry, chemical engineering and space related journals.

Dr. Cutler has also engaged in extensive self-directed study in biochemistry and medicine due to assorted health problems coalescing into a devastating "mystery syndrome" his doctors were not able to cure - or even diagnose - for quite some time. After being able to work with his doctor to get better he decided to expand his professional activities to include writing about health topics.

A Personal Word From Dr. Cutler

"I wrote this book because I became seriously ill while most doctors told me there was nothing wrong. After an "environmental medicine" doctor suggested I had amalgam illness, I had to read lots of medical literature to figure out what was going on and what to do about it. I got better after having my fillings replaced and taking appropriate chelating agents. I also know a lot of other people to whom this happened."

"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 physicians' 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 pylori infection, and ulcers are 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 the whole family medicine they all got better."

"Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome (CFIDS) 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 myself."

"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 expected to have from what happens to little mice and rats in medical school experiments. I wanted to help you get well NOW. The professors can change their lectures later."

"I've written this book according to a modern paradigm of medicine. This new paradigm consists of viewing the human body as a system where biochemistry leads to metabolism which in turn becomes physiology. The new paradigm is to see illness as a slow progression from health to death rather than the sudden onset of a "disease" once a certain number of symptoms occur. The new paradigm lets you use the best of both mainstream and alternative medicine to get well."

The Book | Testimonials | Mercury