Neural Therapy for Migraines, Seizures, and Mercury Toxicity

source: ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE MAGAZINE
www.alternativemedicine.com
Issue 21 Dec, 1997 / Jan, 1998.

Migraines, Seizures, and Mercury Toxicity
Chronic pain and other long-term symptoms often get resolved after a series of injections with a local anesthetic. It’s called NEURAL THERAPY, and it works through the nervous system.

RICHARD LEVITON

Maisie, a 32-year-old actress, had suffered from migraine headaches for nine years. They occurred twice a week and were so intense that she had to retreat to her bed with a cloth over her eyes, all the lights off, and the blinds drawn. Most of the time, the pain lasted through the day, and the next morning she would feel nauseous and exhausted from the ordeal. Maisie was taking a serious amount of conventional migraine medications but none of the drugs abated the frequency or the severity of the attacks.

Maisie was fortunate in making contact with a physician who has an unusual approach to treating chronic pain conditions such as migraines. Dietrich Klinghardt, M.D., Ph.D., who practices in Seattle, Washington, asked Maisie when her migraines started.
She told him that, nine years before, she had been injured on a movie set when a prop gun discharged wrongly and seared her upper arm with powder burns. The burn wound was surgically treated three times to produce a cosmetically acceptable result, but it still left a large, highly visible scar. Maisie’s migraines started four months after this accident; she had never had migraines before. From Dr. Klinghardt’s perspective, the scar was the cause of the migraines, and this understanding suggested the proper course of treatment.

After he gave Maisie a single injection into the scar of 1% procaine, a standard local anesthetic, she never had another migraine attack. That was ten years ago. The secret of how a scar can cause migraines and many other chronic conditions, and how injecting the scarred sites with an anesthetic can produce lasting relief, is the essence of Dr. Klinghardt’s approach, and success.

What a Scar Remembers

“Any part of the body that has been traumatized or ill—no matter where it is located—can become an interference field which may cause disturbance anywhere in the body,” explains Dr. Klinghardt. In his estimation, 30-45% of all illness or pain is caused by an interference field or a linked series of such fields.

Any scar that results from an accident, surgery, or illness can produce a strange, hidden, but long-lasting effect on a person’s health, explains Dr. Klinghardt.

Say you once had an acute upper respiratory tract infection involving the sinuses or tonsils. Even though you apparently recovered long ago, the residual tissue changes of the sinuses or tonsils from the processes of illness can still interfere with the health of other body systems today. It is as if the traumatized tissue still remembers the illness or trauma years later. The connection are various and surprising.

Sinus trauma, for example, can create chronic severe neck pain, migraines, chronic fatigue, or PMS, says Dr. Klinghardt. A gallbladder scar can cause chronic hip pain; traumatized tonsils can affect the knee joint; leg scars can spark sciatica; pelvic scars can trigger arthritis, PMS, or depression; trauma in the prostate, stomach, or sinus can produce neck pain; an appendectomy can lead to rheumatoid arthritis or pelvic pain.

Dr. Klinghardt notes that an injection in tonsil tissue can often relieve chronic migraines. The four front teeth of the upper and lower jaw are related to the urogenital system; problems with these teeth are frequently responsible for pelvic pain, chronic kidney disease, and even cancer in the pelvic organs.

In Dr. Klinghardt’s vocabulary, scars, traumatized organs and teeth, or old injuries are essentially equivalent in the way they interfere with any healthy functioning of the boy. “Any part of the body that has been traumatized or ill—no matter where it is located—can become an interference field which may cause disturbance anywhere in the body,” explains Dr. Klinghardt.

In his estimation, 30-45% of all illness or pain is caused by an interference field or a linked series of such fields. He cites a case in which a woman with pelvic pain improved after she received procain injections in both her uterus and thyroid. In one of the now classic cases in this field (1940), a physician injected a leg scar and provided immediate relief for a severely painful shoulder.

This way of medical thinking is part of a discipline called neural therapy, first pioneered in Germany in 1925 by two German physicians (and brothers), Ferdinand and Walter Huneke, as a way of eliminating pain and chronic illness. In neural therapy, local anesthetics are injected at the sites of old injuries to remove an irritating energy focus in the body that is blocking the flow of electrical and nerve energy.

In neural therapy, a standard anesthetic is carefully injected into specific points in the nervous system. This temporarily restores proper nerve function, enabling cells to eliminate toxic waste, says Dr. Klinghardt. Several important ganglia exist in the neck. A ganglion is a bundle, know, or plexus of nerve cell bodies with many interconnections that acts like a sorting and relay station for nerve impulses. There are several dozen ganglia throughout the body. In other words, scars and sites of physical trauma generate an energy field that interferes with the body’s proper functioning. Dr. Klinghardt estimates that dental factors, extraction sites or root-canaled, devitalized or impacted teeth, can account for between 50% and 80% of interference fields.

Often the results of neural therapy can be seemingly instantaneous—practitioners call this the “lightning reaction”—as if something dammed up has been suddenly released in the body. This reaction frequently entails an emotional release; every injury or surgical scar carries a memory of the events involved in producing it, and somehow the anesthetic releases them, says Dr. Klinghardt.

For example, when he injected at various points in a woman’s pelvic region, she had a spontaneous memory of childhood sexual abuse. With the memory came a release of anger, rage, and tears and, soon after, an end to her long-standing pelvic pain.
rheumatoid arthritis: the body’s immune system attacks the connective tissue around joints, especially in the feet and hands. This leads to inflammation of the (fluid-filled) membranes surrounding the joints. As the condition becomes chronic, neighboring soft tissue hardens and erodes, resulting in deformities and disabilities.

The Inner Life of a Ganglion

To understand how neural therapy produces its dramatic results, it’s necessary to think about processes at the cellular level. Each cell in the body can be regarded as an organism, explains Dr. Klinghardt.

“Ever cell needs to eat, drink, and detoxify itself, to have the cellular equivalent of a urination and bowel movement.” It does this across the cell walls, taking in nutrients and eliminating waste products. The rate at which substances are exchanged across the cell membrane determines how efficiently the cell is working, Dr. Klinghardt says. “It determines the healing ability and aliveness of the organism. The more rapid the transport, the more vital the body.”

This rapid transport is dependent on the status of the membrane potential, which is a difference in electrical charge on both sides of the cell membrane. “Whenever a cell has lost its normal membrane potential, the ion pumps and ionic channels in the cell wall stop working,” says Dr. Klinghardt. In effect, the cell becomes electrically paralyzed and cannot eliminate the waste products of its own cellular processes. “This means that abnormal minerals and toxic substances accumulate inside the cell, leading to an inability of the cell to heal itself and resume normal function.”

Here’s what the scar and interference field come into the picture. Scar tissue can actually produce a measurable electrical charge of up to 1.5 volts. The typical cell’s electrical charge is only 80 millivolts. This means the interference field functions like a battery inappropriately implanted in the body, says Dr. Klinghardt.

The interference field generates abnormal electrical signals which disrupt the autonomic nervous system and the membrane potential of nerve ganglia and nerve fibers. The result can be electrical chaos in the spinal cord and brain, and a cascade of nerve disturbances throughout the body which manifest as chronic pain or dysfunction.

“Neural therapy attempts to break this cycle by identifying the ‘primary lesion,’ or interference field—the structure [scar or focus] that gave the original abnormal signal into the autonomic nervous system,” Dr. Klinghardt says. The local anesthetic, “infiltrated” through the cell wall, temporarily restores the natural membrane potential in nerve cells at the site of physical trauma.

During this respite, which lasts perhaps 30-120 minutes, “the cell uses the time to eliminate a sufficient amount of the toxic waste to regain normal function, often lastingly.”

Now let’s put the theory of neural therapy back into action, with two examples. Dr. Klinghardt treated a man who had been diagnosed with severe arthritis of the hip joints and lower back. He indicated his arthritic symptoms began after a serious bout of prostate gland inflammation. Within seconds after infusing a local anesthetic into the autonomic nerve ganglia surrounding the prostate, the man was pain-free, and the pain did not return in later days.

Dr. Klinghardt notes that in many cases involving women with lower back pain, pain relief and lasting cures can be achieved by injection the Frankenhäuser ganglia (it regulates the sexual organs and functions) surrounding the vagina and uterus. Usually, stress from childbirth or prior pelvic infections create disturbances in the pelvic ganglia which, in turn, generate the pain. “We have consistently observed that with neural therapy, women’s premenstrual symptoms and pain during menstruation disappear along with the back pain,” says Dr. Klinghardt.

Autonomic nervous system: has 2 major divisions: the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. These two divisions comprise the nerve networks that regulate the actions absolutely essential to life. The autonomic nervous functions must be carried on continuously without interruption, independent of the will. The sympathetic system is closely related to the hormone adrenaline and is primarily a stimulator, or accelerator, of metabolic activities.

Membrane potential: refers to differing electrical charges, measured in millivolts, inside and outside of a cell. This, in turn, influences how easily (or not) substances (nutrients or toxins) can pass into and out of a cell. Potassium ions are pumped out of the cell (at a resting potential of -80 mV), increasing the membrane potential (to +40 mV), then sodium ions are pumped in, restoring its normal value (-80 mV). The process, variously called ion pumping, ionic transport, or the ion channel, resembles the ebb and flow of tidal water, with nutrients “washing” in, and toxins washing out with each pulse of the electrical current every 2 to 5 milliseconds.

Parasympathetic: system is closely related to the vitamin-like substance choline, and operates mainly as an inhibitor, or brake, for metabolic activity. Branches of both sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves send electric impulses to all of our glands and organs. The sympathetic system’s basic message is “speed up,” while the parasympathetic system’s is “slow down.”

Blood: is classified into 4 blood types or groups according to the presence of type A and type B antigens on the surface of red blood cells. These antigens are also called agglutinogens and pertain to the blood cells’ ability to agglutinate, or clump together. Type O blood (containing neither type) is found in 47% of the Caucasian population; type A, 41%; type B, 9%; type AB, 3%. Another form of blood grouping is according to Rh-positive and Rh-negative types, based on the distribution of 6 different Rh antigens.

Membrane potential: refers to differing electrical charges, measured in millivolts, inside and outside of a cell. This, in turn, influences how easily (or not) substances (nutrients or toxins) can pass into and out of a cell. Potassium ions are pumped out of the cell (at a resting potential of -80 mV), increasing the membrane potential (to +40 mV), then sodium ions are pumped in, restoring its normal value (-80 mV). The process, variously called ion pumping, ionic transport, or the ion channel, resembles the ebb and flow of tidal water, with nutrients “washing” in, and toxins washing out with each pulse of the electrical current every 2 to 5 milliseconds.

Reversing Pansy’s Five Years of Epileptic Seizures

Pansy was 17 at the time she began treatment with Dr. Klinghardt for severe epileptic seizures. She had suffered from daily grand mal seizures for five years, with all the unpleasant consequences, such a biting her tongue and urinating at inappropriate times. Sometimes she had seizures twice a day. When Pansy took conventional seizure medications, she became psychologically unbalanced, tending toward the psychotic and/or schizophrenic.

After considering her case, Dr. Klinghardt concluded that the cause of her problem lay in her teeth–specifically, the tin and mercury content in her dental amalgam fillings. It appeared that these heavy metals had migrated from her fillings into her brain. As the first step in his treatment, Dr. Klinghardt made a series of neural therapy injections in Pansy’s face (nose, cheeks, forehead, and around the eyes) and scalp making a “crown” of shallow injection points. This kept her seizure-free for three days, “an improvement that told me I was on the right track,” comments Dr. Klinghardt.

Next, the mercury/tin amalgam fillings were properly replaced and, once monthly for the next year, Pansy received intravenous infusions of a nontoxic chemical to bind (“chelate”) the mercury distributed throughout her body tissue and help eliminate it from her body. At this point, Pansy experienced seizures only once a week. Of course, this wasn’t a good enough recovery for Dr. Klinghardt, so he added a new element to his approach.

He gave Pansy a series of neural therapy injections in nerve ganglia on both sides of her neck (stellate ganglion) and on her right temple (sphenopalatine ganglion). His analysis revealed that both nerve bundles were contaminated with mercury and tin; in Dr. Klinghardt’s clinical experience, it is common for heavy metals to migrate to and accumulate in nerve ganglia. The neural therapy injections reduced the frequency of Pansy’s seizures to about once per month.

At this point, which was 18 months into the treatment, Dr. Klinghardt added yet another element by which he hoped to eliminate Pansy’s seizures for good. He had her start taking an alcohol-based tincture of cilantro (Chinese parsley); the fresh herb is known to detoxify the brain and central nervous system of heavy metals while the alcohol base guarantees fast delivery of the cilantro to the brain. Pansy took ten drops of cilantro tincture twice daily, and continued this for a year. After the first dose, she never had an epileptic seizure again, says Dr. Klinghardt.

Cilantro mobilizes mercury or tin stored in the brain and spinal cord and it moves it out of those tissues, but it does not facilitate the removal of heavy metals from the body. For this, a natural detoxifying agent such as chlorella (a freshwater single-celled green algae powder) is needed to bind up the mercury and carry it out of the body through the feces. Dr. Klinghardt notes that a typical dosage of chlorella for this purpose is 12 capsules daily with each capsule containing 330 mg.

How Mercury Disrupts the Body

Dr. Klinghardt offers the following strong statement: “As soon as anybody has any type of medical illness or symptom, whether medical or emotional, the amalgam fillings should be removed and the mercury residues should be eliminated from the body, especially the brain.”Once it has leached from the dental fillings and infiltrated the body, mercury becomes a neurotoxin, says Dr. Klinghardt. Strangely, a neurotoxin is a substance the nerve cells voluntarily absorb, even though it is poisonous.

They do this out of curiosity, Dr. Klinghardt explains. Nerve endings in the peripheral nervous system constantly scan their environment, engulfing foreign particles and bringing them across the cell membrane for inspection. “These substances may then travel all the way up from the foot to the spinal cord and get presented to the nerve cells there.” If the substance is judged to be harmful, the body tries to produce an antitoxin to neutralize it an eliminate it from the body.

But there are two problems here when it comes to mercury, Dr. Klinghardt cautions. “As it travels up in the nerve, it destroys the body’s mechanism and substance, called tubulin, for transporting substances in the nerves (breaking down the bridges behind it, as it were), and in effect, destroying the nerve. Second, the body has not yet learned how to make an antineurotoxin against mercury.”

Laboratory studies have shown that within 24 hours of injecting a minute dose of mercury into a muscle anywhere in the body (monkeys were used in the study), it would be present in the spinal cord and brain. The mercury was also present in the kidneys, lungs, bloodstream, connective tissue, and adrenal and other endocrine glands. In the brain, it tended to congregate in the hypothalamus, which regulates the sympathetic nervous system (associated with the brainstem), believed to be the organic seat of emotions.

While mercury levels slowly dissipate in a predictable amount of time from other body tissues and even from the teeth (in six weeks, its levels might be halved), mercury does not have a “half-life” in the nervous system or brain. Instead, it binds firmly to a specific chemical compound which happens to exist there in the body’s highest concentrations.

“The main devastating effect of mercury in the nervous system is that it interferes with the energy production inside each cell,” says Dr. Klinghardt. “The nerve cell is impaired in its ability to detoxify itself [and excrete the mercury] and in its ability to nurture itself. The cell becomes toxic and dies, or lives in a state of chronic malnutrition. A multitude of illnesses, usually associated with neurological symptoms, result.” Among these are chronic viral and fungal illnesses, recurrent episodes of bacterial infections, and chronic fatigue.

By a curious self-preservation reflex of the body, the emergence of these conditions can be viewed as a way of accommodating the heavy metal presence, speculates Dr. Klinghardt. “Most, if not all, chronic infectious diseases are not caused by a failure of the immune system, but are a conscious adaptation of the immune system to an otherwise lethal heavy metal environment.”

Mercury suffocates the cells and they die, so the immune system cultivates fungi and bacteria which are able to bind large amounts of the toxic metal in their respective cell walls, thereby enabling the patient’s cells to breathe again. The downside, of course, is that the body must now feed these otherwise undesirable microbes and deal with their toxic waste. In addition, a person with mercury contamination often becomes zinc deficient and the functioning of copper and other minerals in the body will be compromised as well.

This perspective leads Dr. Klinghardt to the following strong statement: “As soon as anybody has any type of medical illness or symptom, whether medical or emotional, the amalgam fillings should be removed and the mercury residues should be eliminated from the body, especially the brain.”

Neural therapy is useful in treating mercury-based problems in the nerve ganglia, says Dr. Klinghardt. Mercury, as a heavy metal (which means, heavier than water), tends to accumulate in the lowest parts of the body, such as the floor of the mouth, the pelvic floor, and the feet. Pelvic symptoms, in both men and women, “are very commonly caused by metal toxicity of the Frankenhäuser ganglia.”

A mercury accumulation in this nerve plexus can account for premature ejaculation and an enlarged prostate in men, and endometriosis, pelvic pain, and hormonal dysfunction in women, Dr. Klinghardt says. Neural therapy “cleans up” this area by injecting the Frankenhäuser ganglia (just above the pubic bone) with a local anesthetic.

“This opens up most of the ionic channels in the cell wall; the cell is then able to excrete a high number of its toxic components.” This painless injection spurs the body to dump a large amount of mercury into the urine, Dr. Klinghardt says.
“Very often, at the same time, any emotional material the patient hasn’t worked out before, mostly to do with sexual development or abuse from earlier years, will be remembered. A memory that was not accessible before will suddenly right there in front of a patient, very alive, and one will momentarily relive some of the traumatic moments from their past which are associated with that body region.”

Contact Dr Klinghardt at the Klinghardt Institute for further information.