When Your Body Is Rusting Out
How heavy metals and minerals can drive high blood pressure, fatigue, and gut issues
A Moment with Dr. Stillman
Most of the men in our practice are:
Hard-charging
Conscientious
Highly educated (particularly about health and wellness)
They’re the kind of men who run themselves into the ground providing for and protecting other people.
That’s when they reach out to us for help.
This post is about one of those men, and how he rusted out years before he was ready to slow down.
He ate well, worked hard, and didn’t complain much. But for years he had been struggling with:
Fatigue
Gut issues (bloating, abdominal pain, reflux)
High blood pressure
Inflammation and swelling all over his body
Skin rashes that came and went
He had been to many doctors. He had tried “all the things.” His labs came back “normal.”
He and his wife refused to accept this. Finally, after considering many different options, he joined our practice.
What I Found When I Looked Closer
Here’s what we found with comprehensive labs:
Extremely elevated iron levels
Extremely elevated cadmium levels on hair testing
Low zinc
Elevated homocysteine
I see this all the time. The body has run out of resources and is accumulating toxins. As resources run out, more toxins accumulate, because you need resources like zinc and glutathione (just to name two) in order to eliminate toxins.
Our plan:
Blood donation
Our gut healing protocol (coming soon)
Mineral balancing (personalized mineral and vitamin supplements based on his labs)
Vitamin C, MSM, and our iodine protocol (you can read the vitamin C and iodine protocols here on Substack - just enter it in search)
Several months later, he reports that he’s more than 50% better. Here’s what shifted:
Blood pressure was extremely elevated for a few months, and then it normalized
Gut issues flared, then improved
Iron and heavy metals levels improved
Energy returned
He said in a recent follow-up that he was feeling, “better than he had in years.”
That makes my day.
What Nobody Had Looked For
Iron is not just a nutrient. In excess, it is a toxin. It oxidizes tissues, effectively “rusting out” the body as it accumulates. Patients often struggle for years, going from practitioner to practitioner until they finally find someone who understands how iron actually works in our bodies.
He happened to have a genetic mutation that predisposed him to high iron levels.
I described iron-handling to him this way.
Some people are built like high-carbon knives. They cut just as well as anyone else, or even better. They also rust faster. If the rust builds up, you have to buff it out or it starts to degrade the whole tool.
Elevated iron depletes zinc, and zinc depletion is one of the most underappreciated drivers of immune dysfunction, inflammation, and poor repair capacity in the patients we see. When iron is high and zinc is low, the body is accumulating damage faster than it can repair it. That is the Repair Deficit in its most concrete form.
Cases like this are common in our practice. The pattern was there in the labs if you know what to look for. Most practitioners just don’t know what to look for.
“It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has.” — William Osler, MD
One Thing To Explore This Week
What’s your iron status? Are you overloaded? Deficient? A standard CBC does not tell you what you need to know about iron overload. If you have chronic fatigue, gut problems, elevated blood pressure, or a family history of similar symptoms, iron could be the key.
Where to Go From Here
Your body isn’t broken. It may have been quietly depleted. I call this “rusting out.” Once you know what the problem is, you can start to actually solve it.
If you see yourself in this story, book an Inflammation and Autoimmunity Assessment with a member of my team. During this call, we’ll discuss what you’re dealing with, what your goals are, and how we can help, whether that’s becoming a patient at our practice, joining one of our online programs, or a referral to a trusted partner of ours in your region.
As always, discuss any changes with your own licensed clinician. Read our full disclaimers, disclosures, and our position on health freedom here.
Until next time, be well,
Dr. Stillman
Educational content only. Not medical advice. See full disclaimers.