My iron poisoning nightmare

My iron poisoning nightmare

August, 2014

In early 2006, I moved to a house in the mountains that used a well for its water source. The toilets and sinks were stained orange from the high levels of iron in the well water. Plus the water happened to be acidic, leaching out the iron from the metal water pipes in the house, making the iron levels in the water even higher (according to the company who installed my iron filter later on). The water was orange coming out of the faucets for about 2 seconds, then it cleared up. The orange color got more intense after letting the water sit in the pipes overnight or after being away on a trip. Presumably the acidic water had more time to eat away at the pipe as it sat there longer.

The people who previously lived at the house had been there for 25 years, drinking the water. They were moving because the husband had developed Parkinson’s, so they were going to lower elevation to be closer to their daughter. The pine needle covered land the house sat on consisted of red soil (a sign of high iron levels). Pine needles make the soil acid, good for growing blueberries, but I guess maybe bad for turning well water acidic?

I had never heard of iron poisoning other than little kids eating an entire bottle of mom’s anemia treatment iron pills. As far as living somewhere with such weird water, I just figured I would get a water filtration system to pull out the iron just for cosmetic and water taste reasons. I lived there drinking the water and showering in it for about 18 months before the water filter was finally installed. It took that long to get the water tested, order the right system, and then install it. After researching iron filtration, it turned out to be somewhat difficult to pull iron out of water, especially out of acidic water. After $4000 and an entire 6′ x 6′ shed full of filters and pipes, I had my iron filter in place. Part of the filter had an opening where I would add in a few cups of calcium powder about every two weeks. This was required in order to raise the pH of the water so that the filter media could successfully pull out the iron. Once a day, an automatic timer would back-flush the filter media to rid it of the iron that had accumulated. The filter cleaned the water for the entire property.

Before the filter was installed, I noticed that my pillow case had turned a deep orange. Because I would shower at night and go to bed with damp hair, the residual water on my hair slowly stained my pillow over the months, despite washing the cover at somewhat regular intervals!

 

Over the next six months I began to notice mild back pain for the first time in my life. I thought it was caused by my 45 minute commute since moving to the mountains. The cold snowy winters weren’t as fun as I thought they’d be, the 2008 crash hit my business hard, the commute was apparently hurting my low back, so I decided to move back to town in early 2009. So all in all, I spent 18 months drinking iron water, and another 18 months after the filter was installed before moving.

 

I only recently found out that when you live at high elevation (this property was at 4500 feet) not only do your red blood cells and hemoglobin change to make up for the thinner air at elevation, but your gut changes so that it absorbs iron more easily (iron is needed to make hemoglobin, the oxygen carrying protein found in red blood cells)!

While living at the mountain property, my low back only hurt mildly from time to time. But 3-6 weeks after moving to lower elevation again, I began to have severe back pain that kept me from sleeping at night. It turns out that when you go to lower elevation, your body changes by making fewer red blood cells and less hemoglobin because the higher levels are no longer needed. This process releases iron as the hemoglobin is broken down by the spleen. This sudden flood of free iron was very inflammatory.

 

My back wasn’t too bad during the day, but night was awful. None of my chiropractor friends could help me, in fact chiropractic adjustments began to be very painful for the first time. The pain would come and go seemingly randomly, often it would be completely gone (if I wasn’t too active), and then it would return suddenly with a vengeance.

 

I still had no inclination that I had an iron poisoning at this point in time. Desperate for a cure, I wondered if I had suddenly developed a food allergy. So I cut out all wheat and gluten products since several of my relatives have gluten allergies. After a month of no improvement, it was obvious that gluten had nothing to do with my mysterious pain. Next on the list was dairy.

Bingo! If I stayed completely away from dairy, I had almost zero pain at night. Then with the slightest bit of dairy it was immediately painful that night. I eventually tracked it down to lactose intolerance rather than an allergy to casein. To this day (as of August 2014) my back is a very sensitive lactose detector. Even yogurt and whole cream have lactose in them apparently. Interestingly, if I ferment the yogurt myself, I have no pain. This means that store bought yogurt is never fully fermented. It is the lactose that the bacteria eat and turn into an acid that curdles the milk into yogurt as you know. And of course I can eat moderate amounts of any dairy without back pain as long as I take several lactase enzyme pills with it.

 

Well, problem solved right? Spontaneous lactose intolerance (which I never had any hints of prior). Well, yes, I no longer had back pain induced insomnia.

 

But I did seem to have a general lack of energy, extremely exaggerated after minimal exertion. I remember raking the lawn for about 5 minutes before giving up due to fatigue and then having shoulder and arm discomfort for several days after. Looking back, I had a very foggy brain, very short temper, and edges of depression. Though somehow none of it seemed odd at the time. My brain would come up with some reasonable sounding excuse for feeling bad, sometimes even blaming my girlfriend’s normal behaviors as the cause of my problems!

 

It wasn’t for a good couple of years, that I had found that a mixture of glutathione powder and DMSO applied topically would help alleviate exercise induced pain. Iron isn’t supposed to exit the body via the sweat glands, but DMSO is a very good carrier chemical for almost anything. So after having applied an extra large dose of my topical concoction the night before, I went to aikido practice in the morning. We wear white jerseys during practice. Normally we don’t sweat much, but for some reason that morning we worked out really hard and I sweat a lot. Class ended, I packed up my jersey, and life continued.

Then a week later, again at aikido class (should have washed jersey, but didn’t), as I was opening my jersey to put it on, the entire inside portion that soaked up the sweat from my back the week before had turned deep orange and it immediately reminded me of my pillow case from my old mountain house. (I had left the mountain house shortly after my back started hurting, never to return, another story entirely). It didn’t hit me right away what this meant. But then a few hours later I had the big aha! I was iron toxic!

I began to ask around and read up on it. My girlfriend’s boss had a story about working at Mammoth lakes one summer and by the end of the summer his joints hurt really bad. Somehow he figured out to stop drinking the well water and after several weeks the pain began to reduce.

So I ordered the lab work necessary to diagnose the iron overload. Several markers were borderline high, and one was actually out of the normal range high. At first it seemed like maybe I was wrong, could such a small elevation cause such bad symptoms? But the more I read, the more I realized that the tissues of the body, especially the liver, pancreas, and heart soak up the excess iron to keep blood levels normal. It had been well over a year, maybe two between my last iron exposure and my first iron blood test. The definitive would be a liver biopsy, but since there are serious risks with it, I haven’t done that.

Some of the well established medical effects of iron poisoning include pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, heart failure, muscle and joint pain, and dementia.

I still have not read anything about iron causing the pancreas to stop producing lactase enzymes, but if it accumulates in the pancreas, it seems possible.

The only affordable way to get iron out of the body is through bleeding. So I donate blood every two months now. Luckily my blood iron levels are not high enough to be toxic to a recipient, so they don’t have to discard my blood donation. Over time it should slowly suck out the iron from my organs, muscles and joints.

I also did a urine mineral test pre and post EDTA chelation IV challenge. The iron rose mildly on the post test, meaning that it was mildly pulling out iron. So I did a serious of IV chelation treatments over 9 months or so. But before these, I remembered that I had added calcium to my water filter to get the iron out of the water. So I started taking lots of calcium with each meal and found that this actually made a huge difference in my fatigue and workout soreness. I later read that taking calcium with a meal can block iron absorption from the food.

 

I’ve been feeling almost normal now for about a year or so. I was able to work two 12-hour days this last spring pruning several large trees and felling two others and cutting all the wood with a chainsaw with only normal levels of soreness! I thought this was a great sign that my iron levels were finally low enough to live a normal life again, be able to do yard work and maybe even start running again. But a few days after all the chainsaw work, my low back locked up and I couldn’t move.

I rested for a day and it eased up enough to go to work, but I was very cautious in my movements. I made an appointment with a chiropractor who had been recommended to me by a friend of a friend because it sounded like he didn’t do normal chiropractor stuff. To my surprise, he dug his elbow into my back muscles, putting all his weight into it. He essentially stripped my back, hip, side, and even neck muscles like he was straightening the fibers of a raw tri-tip roast. IT WAS EXTREMELY PAINFUL. I have an unusually high will power to suppress withdrawal reflexes due to pain, he was surprised I could take such deep pressure on the first visit. I was almost floating outside my body it was so painful, and afterwards I actually thought this must be what it’s like to be raped.

But I was sore for three days and then my back and muscles felt great! I actually went back the next week and every muscle he had worked the week before was not painful in the least as he dug in and stripped them, to his surprise. But as soon as he ventured to a set of muscles in my shoulders that he had not treated the week before, again it was extremely painful!

It occurred to me that perhaps my muscle were also an iron sponge, and the pain was him literally squeezing out the iron into the blood so to speak? Why else would the same procedure go from extreme pain to almost none?

 

Anyway, after the second visit I decided I could do the same manual iron flush from my muscles on my own at home using the floor or wall, my body weight, and a golf ball or baseball between the two.

 

If my iron in soft tissue theory is correct, then I need to somehow squeeze it out of my internal organs. It might be possible for liver and pancreas, but not my heart and certainly not my brain!

I still haven’t done it yet, but one obvious thing I should do is put on my old DMSO topical and then go exercise or sit in a sauna. But that stuff really stinks!

 

My blood levels are now down to normal, but it’s not a good reflection of the iron content of my organs. And I am still lactose intolerant.

 

I recently read that hemochromotosis patients (they have a genetic defect where they absorb way too much iron from normal food and get iron toxic from just regular food) are asymptomatic if they are heterozygous for the defect, but only carriers, according to standard medical teaching. But now a subgroup of doctors is studying whether the carriers also exhibit ease of iron overload, but to a much lesser degree. I’m going to get the test one day to see if maybe I’m a carrier. It’s a $250 test, and it won’t really change my treatment protocol, so it’s not high on the list, though I am very curious.

Interestingly, a year after I bought the house in the mountains, my neighbor visited the guy with Parkinson’s and when he got back he told me that the man had been dramatically improving in his condition! Everyone was attributing it to the lower elevation, but was it really just getting away from the iron water that helped him improve?

His wife had no known health problems, but she of course had been menstruating each month. When a women loses blood during her menses, she loses some iron with it. This may have been enough to prevent the iron from building up in her system over the years.

The previous owners lived there for 20 years, but I only lived there drinking iron water for 18 months. So why was I affected so severely? I think it’s because I drink ¾ gallon water daily, and they likely only drank a cup or two if they are like the average American.

 

January 20, 2017

 

I seem to be able to get away with small amounts of dairy without much back pain. So maybe there is hope for my pancreas. I think I must also have a casein milk protein allergy because I get slight sinus congestion when I eat a lot of dairy (always fully fermented or using lactase enzymes), and I just feel better overall when I don’t eat dairy, so I’m never going to be a dairy eater again. But it is a good test for my pancreas if I can eat non fermented dairy without lactase pills and without any intestinal or back pain resulting.

For about a year I have been running again. I’m using minimalist “five finger” shoes with no arch support and no padding to speak of, so I have to run differently than I used to in order to prevent foot injury. This requires a shorter stride. I’m also hoping to do multi day trail running trips that require me to wear a backpack. So I’ve been carrying a lightweight backpack on my training runs.

Though I have no workout soreness that would be considered unusual, my ribs and mid back often feel tight and sometimes mildly painful. And now that I am getting in better shape, and I’m starting to run faster, my stride is lengthening some, especially if I am running down hills. I have begun to notice some pain in my right hip flexor called the psoas muscle. This muscle is used and stretched more with a longer stride.

The other week, I did a ½ mile near-sprint in the middle of a longer run, just for fun and to see what would happen. I felt fine. But for the next three days I had sharp and severe pain in my psoas muscles where they attach to my rib cage. It kept me from sleeping well for three nights.

Then yesterday I had a full body assessment from an athletic trainer at the gym. He found that my rib cage is very tight and the deep muscles of my hips are very tight. He had me do specific stretches for these, all of which were very painful.

My guess is that these deep muscles are very hard to get to for massaging out the iron and so they must still have iron in them. But maybe with enough of the right stretching I can finally get the iron out of these too.

So it’s a good thing I am running because I would not know that there is still iron in these muscles other wise.

 

December 2017

 

I ate some cheese the other day, did not take any enzymes, and didn’t have any pain at all! I’m very happy about this. Hopefully this means that the iron is out of my pancreas. But I still think I will stay away from dairy in general. I don’t think it is as healthy for adults as most doctors and TV commercials make it out to be. And at this point, I no longer miss it or crave it.

 

Looking Forward!

Yours in health,

Dr. Campise
Fresno Chiropractor

#fresnochiropractor #neuroemotional #hyperbaric #lighttherapy #homeopathy #chelation