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COPYRIGHT 2002 Mothering Magazine
Mothering Magazine: How and when did your medical career begin?
Stephanie Cave: I'm a board-certified family physician and started my practice in 1986. Dr. Amy Holmes and I have an integrated medicine practice in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which just means that we integrate everything the patients need, hopefully in a nontoxic manner. I went to medical school when I was 36. At the time, I had a ten-year-old son with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). I've always worked toward a practice where I could integrate metabolic medicine--nutritional therapy and normalizing biochemistry--because it works so well. And I keep telling people you can't help but get better if your chemistry becomes more normal.
MM: So your practice has evolved primarily into treating the biochemistry?
SC: Yes. We do laboratory determinations of amino acids and trace minerals and vitamins in the blood. Then we put in what's missing, working with each child individually. In the 1980s I worked primarily with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) children. In the mid-1990s, I started seeing autistic children. I got a protocol from the Autism Research Institute in San Diego, which happened to be the same one that I was using with ADD children. And it worked beautifully for the autistic children, too. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that we realized that these children had a problem with metal.
MM: What were you seeing?
SC: We started testing hair, urine, and blood samples around that time. We found low levels of mercury in the hair and high levels of several other metals, like aluminum, antimony, arsenic, and tin, in the blood and urine. These children retain mercury, which is toxic to them.
MM: Did you find these metals across the board in children who exhibited some form of developmental delay?
SC: Yes. The children fell within the autism spectrum, including those with speech and language delay, ADD, ADHD, PDD-NOS
(Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified), Asperger's Syndrome, and Autism DSM-IV. I feel they are part of the same spectrum because they all seem to improve dramatically when we start treating them metabolically and actually detoxifying the metal. They improved as we did repletion of nutrition and improved bowel-bacteria balance. But when we started pulling metal, all of them started turning around. And the earlier they were treated, the greater the improvement.
MM: What do you suspect are the sources of the metals you are finding ?
SC: Tin may come from some stannous-fluoride...
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