Back in the sixteenth century in Europe, the wealthy aristocracy wondered why citizens would get sick and die in the prime of their lives. They prayed to find out why women died in childbirth and children were born deaf and what is tuberculosis, and a thing called cowpox. The landed gentry with their money, and their power, and their influence commissioned scientists and general practitioners to elucidate the cause of disease. These people began dissecting human cadavers to elucidate the causation of disease. The disease is categorized by the color of the pus, the size of an organ (hypertrophy or hypotrophy), and its weight. These parameters were the only ones available to the scientists at the time. Pathologists still do the same thing and autopsies are hopelessly outdated by laboratory science and Microbiology discoveries. Now scientists have machines that categorize sickness by genomic abnormalities but they do not tell the uneducated public that the mutations they discover might lie on the intergene DNA. Most genes that code protein are well spaced out by spacer DNA. This security through obscurity obfuscates horrible chemicals that destroy the DNA. Most mutations occur in the spacer DNA if they occurred in the genes, they would not function correctly.
About one-half century ago, God’s gift to medicine decided after a half-century of practice that disease is either infectious or due to poisoning. In other words, if a physician rules out infectious disease with a battery of laboratory tests, that patient has been poisoned. Poisoning can be acute or chronic depending on the dose level and duration of poisoning. Various poisons affect different organs in different ways and certain poisons affect different organs differently. Poisons can be organic in nature, petroleum-based, or inorganic salts of various elements. If a student looks at the periodic table of the elements, and looks at it again, at the groups and classes of elements with different electron levels, he or she discerns differences in chemical action. The transition metals have electron configurations of plus two to plus six and can mimic to some extent, the natural ions sodium (+1) and potassium (+1) which constitute the major inorganic elements in the body. The heavy earth metals like lead, arsenic, and more have an electron configuration of +2, this is why they are absorbed by the body. Lead and arsenic resemble calcium (+2) which constitutes the major element of bone and muscle including the heart. Any chemical element on the periodic table that ionizes, has the capability of causing disease if it accumulates in appreciable concentrations. Scientists can look at the table and decide what element he or she is going to use as a poison. Even halogens that form a Negative one valence can uptake like protein which has a negative one valence in situ.
The stage sets for American medicine in the twenty-first century. American medicines’ preeminence happened because of laboratory science, and if the laboratory is not available, Chinese medicine functions better at diagnosis and treatment. The tools for emergency room physicians are now high-pressure gas-liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. HPLC is ideal for enumerating organic toxins in the body. Turn to the last chapter of the text (Current diagnosis and treatment) and look at the variety of common household poisons that affect humankind and can be brought to light for us all to see. HPLC can bring a diagnosis, and treatment might be to be doused with hexane until the organic object passes out in the urine. Older people who sit in bars drink hard liquor not only to get intoxicated but also to initiate the elimination of organic toxins in their urine. Ethanol solubilizes organic toxins. Do we need to be hospitalized and get intravenous infusions of grain alcohol? Common poisons not in the text include atropine, strychnine, ibogaine, and more. Further work in the field and pharmacy will eventually create modalities for the elimination of organic toxic entities.
The real concern for emergency room physicians is inorganic ions. Certain ionic species share predilection for certain organs and accumulate in these organs causing acute intoxication or poisonings of lesser amount and longer duration: chronic disease. Pathologists will spend a decade removing organs from cadavers that died of chronic degenerative diseases and burning them with mass spectrometry until they understand what elements in the periodic table exhibit toxic properties and organ predilection. The function of discovery is an easy task. More arduous is elaborating on what chelating agents are most efficacious for removing inorganic ions from the body. For example, what most internists regard as actinic keratosis in the elderly is merely chronic arsenic poisoning that if it continues, causes skin cancer. Lead seems to accumulate most in the kidney and then the brain, hence renal failure and senile dementia. Transuranic elements cause psychological derangement before chronic disease. Does anybody remember when Psychiatrists had to be board-certified in internal medicine before practicing psychiatry? Many Psychiatric maladies are merely chronic afflictions due to the accumulation of inorganic ions. Is it true uranium ions cause manic-depressive illness? The real work to be done is discovering novel chelating agents that remove metal from the body. BAL removes everything. EDTA removes lead and arsenic, deferoxamine removes iron and other transition elements. Succimer which is a four-carbon moiety resembles oxaloacetate in the TCA cycle and causes sickness and weakness and although it is an over-the-counter agent, it is to be avoided because it is toxic and doesn’t work too well. The sky is the limit, and drug companies have a lot of growing harvesting, and extracting to find new and more efficacious chelating agents. Pathologists will be burning tissue by mass spectrometry to give the working public a handle on what is ailing them. Then we have to find a cure. Like the gift to medicine said, “disease is either an infection or a poisoning” and he was too old to do anything about it when he made this conclusion and discovery. Now the ball is in our courts and there is a lot of work to do. It is a lot of work!