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Transcript
- 04:00 About Dr. Rick Malter
- 17:20 Balancing Copper Toxicity
- 19:05 “Magnesium Man”
- 25:56 Hair Mineral Analysis’ bad rep
- 40:37 History of Hair Mineral Analysis
- 48:55 Developments in Hair Mineral Analysis
- 56:33 More about Dr. Rick Malter
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast, the video podcast. I am your host, Wendy Myers and you can find me on myersdetox.com. You can find the video podcast on my YouTube channel, which is https://www.youtube.com/user/WendyLiveto110.
Today, we have my very good friend, Dr. Rick Malter on the podcast today. We’re going to be talking about the history and the future of Hair Mineral Analysis.
I have become obsessed Hair Mineral Analysis. I love using this tool with my clients because I found it’s really one of the most effective things, such a useful tool. We need to look at body chemistry. You have to look at someone’s body chemistry to be able to heal someone’s health conditions and to improve their health and heal their thyroid and their adrenals and heal so many health conditions that baffle medicine.
So basically, we’re going to be talking about who started Hair Mineral Analysis, who the major players are today and what are some of the exciting developments in the field and why it’s also such an effective tool for naturally healing health conditions.
But first, we have to do the disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. The Live to 110 Podcast is solely informational in nature. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging in any treatment that we suggest on this show.
I’m really excited. I’ve got a brand new website. myersdetox.com has gotten facelift. Definitely go and check that out. I’ve also launched my new Mineral Power Program where you can use a Hair Mineral Analysis to gauge what’s going on inside you. I give you a whole program – diet, lifestyle, detox and supplements – to heal what’s going on in your body.
Our guest today is Dr. Rick Malter. In 1971, he earned a PhD in Education & School Psychology from the University of Illinois. He’s a licensed nutrition counselor, as well as a licensed clinical psychologist.
For the past 30 years, Dr. Malter has had a strong interest in nutrition and hair mineral analysis. Before he retired from his clinical psychology practice, nutrition and hair mineral analysis where very valuable components in services that he offered to his clients, which included children, adolescents and adults.
In 2002, he wrote the The Strands of Health: A Guide to Understanding Hair Mineral Analysis. The book basically introduces the basic concepts related to understanding hair mineral analysis, also called HTMA (hair tissue mineral analysis). It’s a great book. I’m almost finished with it. I think it’s a wonderful resource for anyone that wants to learn why they should be doing a hair mineral analysis.
Dr. Malter continues to offer many different kinds of seminars on his site, MalterInstitute.org and does hair analysis consultations.
So, Dr. Malter, thank you for coming on the show.
Dr. Rick Malter: Thank you for inviting me. I just need to clarify one thing. I’ve retired from my practice in May 2001. I left Chicago. I moved to my home in Cottonwood, Arizona. After I was down here a couple of years, I let my licenses lapse. I was going to be in full-blown retirement.
Wendy Myers: Nice.
Dr. Rick Malter: With the Internet and networking, I got active in doing consultations and setting up my seminar. So I’m no longer currently licensed. I was licensed for many years in Illinois and I just let the licenses lapse. So it’s just important to clarify that point.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, accidentally on-purpose, so you can stay retired.
Wendy Myers: Well, so why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and why you love hair mineral analysis so much.
Dr. Rick Malter: Well, I love hair mineral analysis because without a doubt, I think it literally saved my life and restored my health 34 years ago in 1980. I was in a total state of burnout.
For your listeners who know something about blood sugar testing, my fasting blood sugar at the time was 45, which is just above being in a coma. It’s so low. My doctors were baffled why I was in such a burnt out state with such a severe reaction of hypoglycemia.
Fortunately, I was working with a couple of gentlemen who had a wonderful out-patient clinic for kids with learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders, developmental delays and other developmental problems and they asked me to be their psychologist doing psychological and intelligence testing, which I did.
I was intrigued with watching them do their various optometric evaluations for vision, sensory-motor testing, allergy testing and educational testing. They also did hair analysis. I was just intrigued with all the things they were reporting to parents from the hair analysis.
Wendy Myers: That was very cutting-edge that they were doing that.
Dr. Rick Malter: They were really cutting-edge. Fortunately, I was hooked up with them because the educator doctor, Dr. Candelaria – PhD educator, brilliant man – told me one day while we were out for coffee that I better get a hair analysis because I didn’t look good or healthy. Something was drastically wrong with me.
So we got a hair analysis. When he got the results, he told me that I was this close to a heart attack. That got my attention. How did he know that? Well, my hair mineral analysis magnesium level was 0.9 mg. per cent or 9 ppm. The ideal magnesium is 6 mg per cent. I was way down 90% below ideal.
That got my attention and launched me on my magnesium obsession.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I see you’re wearing a magnesium t-shirt.
Dr. Rick Malter: My magnesium t-shirt. So I got on magnesium and slowly, but surely rebuilt my blood sugar levels to normal, rebuilt my energy, cleared my foggy mind and got me very intrigued with it. I began reading Dr. Paul Eck’s 1981 interview with the editors of Healthy E newsletter. That’s a classic. You can get from the Analytical Research Lab in Phoenix for a few dollars. It’s a great read, an introduction to hair analysis.
And then I started flying down from Chicago to Phoenix to attend once or twice a year seminars with Dr. Eck and his colleague, Dr. David Watts. I was just blown away by the information they had and the information they can derive from this simple test.
Now a lot of people assume that if you squeeze the hair and not pull out, but just squeeze, you don’t feel any pain. They said, “Well, hair is dead. How can you get live information out of it?” Well, the minerals do not deposit randomly in the hair analysis. The minerals are driven by various lifestyle factors – stress, what we eat, what we drink, supplements, drugs and medications, relationships.
The hair analysis besides being a physiological test is a psychological test because the minerals are closely related to the stress response and stress has a physiological and a psychological component, the fight or flight part.
Fight is anger and rage and flight is anxiety and panic. So as a psychologist, this was a great find for me to discover hair analysis – much better than the Rorshach Inkblot Test.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’ve studied psychology a long time. I’ve been obsessed with psychology and reading books and taking classes and clinical psychology, et cetera. I was really blown away when I learned how so many metal toxicities and mineral deficiencies drive our behavior and our personality. Everything else I have learned, I thought was just a waste of time because you have to heal copper toxicity (another issue in the hair test) before you can have mental health.
Dr. Rick Malter: Right! And when we look at a diagnostic manual like we psychiatrist publish every 10 or 15 years, the DSM manual (they just came up with the 5th edition), they keep increasing the numbers of mental illnesses that they fabricate. You could lump virtually all of their so-called mental illnesses under the rubric of stress and variations of it. And along with stress, the impact of toxic metals.
So you could shrink this big, thick diagnostic manual down to a very, very think little booklet if you focus on what a hair analysis reveals about a person’s stress and toxic metals.
Wendy Myers: So how long have you been doing HTMA’s?
Dr. Rick Malter: Well, I started in 1980 with my first hair analysis that picked up my magnesium deficiency and pulled me back from the brink of a heart attack and diabetes. So that really got my attention. And then I began attending the seminars.
One of the things that I realized in attending the seminars (and if you ever listen to some of the recordings of the seminars), Dr. Eck was a great storyteller. He had a deep, booming voice. And so, he would start off talking about hair analysis and the fact that it could identify a person’s oxidation type – are they a fast oxidizer or a slow? Well, before long, he was already talking about copper toxicity and going off in tangents talking about copper toxicity and how many women he knew who were copper toxic.
Well, those were very interesting anecdotes, but it didn’t make for easy learning of the basic concepts because he’d go off on all these tangents. He was very entertaining, but it was a real struggle to follow along and to understand how did you arrive at fast oxidizer profiles and slow oxidizer profiles.
Wendy Myers: …which is someone’s metabolic rate basically in a nutshell.
Dr. Rick Malter: Yeah, yeah. Now, part of my psychology training was in learning and curriculum organization because part of my training was in school psychology and educational psychology. After a couple of seminars (these were 2-day seminars, Saturdays and Sundays), I said to myself, “This is wonderful information, but it could be boiled down to just a few hours if it’s organized properly and if you sequence the introduction and the concepts and illustrating the graphs in proper order. Then you can condense it and you could teach it very, very efficiently and that would facilitate people learning it.”
Now one of the things that became very clear to me – well, for one thing, Dr. Henry Schroeder, an MD many years ago made the statement that minerals are the spark plugs of life. That’s the foundation for hair analysis. It gives us a way to assess our mineral status and how the minerals are interrelated all the way down to the cell and tissue level.
So that’s part of the context from which I view hair analysis. These are those spark plugs of life.
Wendy Myers: And they give us energy. So many of my clients, they start a program doing HTMA and taking the minerals to balance the imbalances on the hair tests and most of them instantaneously report more energy.
Dr. Rick Malter: Yup, because it’s geared to the mineral imbalances in which nutrients are needed to start the rebalancing, to pick up the low ones and to reduce the toxic or out-of-balance ones.
And the minerals also are interrelated in what I refer to a very dynamic, constantly changing system that’s closely connected to our nervous system, the sympathetic part of it (the stress part) and the parasympathetic nervous system and the endocrine glands (primarily, the adrenals and thyroids). When the thyroid shows low in a hair analysis (that would be a high calcium to a low potassium), then the parathyroid gland is overactive and that’s forcing calcium into the wrong places like into soft tissues, joints and arteries and around organs.
Wendy Myers: That’s exactly what I had when I first had my first test. I had high calcium (about 120) and just painful muscles and achy joints, I’m sure some calcifications of my arteries. It was very unpleasant and those have all gone. It’s all been broken up.
Dr. Rick Malter: If you had known Dr. Eck, he would’ve looked at your blondish hair and said, “Well, obviously, you’re going to be copper toxic and have this high calcium.” And so you could’ve become one of his anecdotes.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I was copper toxic when I first started.
Dr. Rick Malter: Of course, you were. It is such an epidemic. What Eck and Watts were able to do is they trace it back to the pioneering research of Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, an MD and a PhD in Princeton, New Jersey. Pfeiffer had written a book, Mental and Elemental Nutrients and one of his chapters was on copper toxicity. Pfeiffer founded the Brian Bio Center in Princeton. And so one of his focal points in his clinical work and research was on the connection between estrogen and copper.
Ever since the birth control pill and hormone replacement were introduced, that started the cascade of changes in the mineral patterns of teenage girls and young women and turned them into copper toxic, very low energy, very burned out young people.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I was on the birth control pill for 20 years. It did a number on me.
Dr. Rick Malter: It did a number on you and how many millions of others. It’s interesting listening to the supreme court cases about contraception now Hobby Lobby case. They totally miss the profound impact that the birth control pill has had on the health of teenage girls and women and what are we going to do to counteract that adverse trend that’s literally destroyed the health of countless numbers of women.
Wendy Myers: And so is there any other way to balance copper besides doing a mineral balancing program using a hair mineral analysis?
Dr. Rick Malter: Well, there’s other ways. You can use IV Pennicilamin, but that may take out too much too fast. When it comes to detoxing, timing and pacing is an important concept. There may be certain acute cases of toxicity where IV chelation may be warranted. But for most people, it’s best to use nutrition and supplementation to begin to provide the body with its nutritional support and to trust the wisdom of the body to know when is the right time to start releasing excess copper or other toxic metals.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and it just needs minerals to do that.
Dr. Rick Malter: Right! And once you start detoxing copper, for some women, it could be an absolutely debilitating temporary process. I advise young women or teenagers at school, don’t try to detox copper if you have an important paper to write or if you have important exams coming up because if you’re in the middle of copper detox, it’s like you’re in the middle of PMS and the flu and your brain is not going to be working optimally. You will be at a distinct disadvantage until you pass through that temporary detox phase.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s a necessary evil, absolutely.
Wendy Myers: So you’re called the ‘magnesium men’ along with your buddy Morley Robbins. So why are you called the ‘magnesium men’?
Dr. Rick Malter: Well, as I related, I started off with hair analysis 34 years ago because it showed I had an acute life threatening magnesium deficiency. So I’ve been reading and talking about magnesium and magnesium deficiency for years.
Here in Cottonwood in Sedona, we’ve had networking groups that my wife and I participated in. Virtually, every time, I would get up to say a few words, it would be about hair analysis, magnesium deficiency and heart attacks.
So one time at a luncheon meeting, I get up to speak. One of the lady says, “Oh, here’s magnesium man.” So she dubbed me ‘magnesium man’…
Wendy Myers: And it stuck.
Dr. Rick Malter: And it stuck. And there’s a wonderful t-shirt place in our little town here, so I went down there and told them I’m interested in having them design a ‘magnesium man’ t-shirt for me. So they went ahead and designed this t-shirt and I got a couple for Morley, a t-shirt like this.
I also got him a sweatshirt because he was still up in the Chicago area. So I got him a magnesium man sweatshirt for the winter up there.
So that’s how I became magnesium man because I feel it’s such an important issue. I would say that with hair analysis, what we have learned is how pervasive copper toxicity is and how pervasive magnesium deficiency is.
I would ask to make the copper toxicity and magnesium deficiency probably account for at least 85%-90% of health problems – and that includes mental health as well as physical health.
When medical doctors and psychiatrist try to tease out a diagnosis based on a few symptoms without knowing the underlying biochemistry, it turns out they’re guessing. In some ways, I feel badly for those kinds of practitioners because they don’t have access to such good data as are available through hair analysis.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Yeah, I really admire that you use that in your practice because you truly, truly helped your clients other than just doing the talk therapy and maybe some diagnostic testing. I think doing a hair tissue mineral analysis is one of the only ways to truly get to the underlying causes of mental illness.
Dr. Rick Malter: Correct. Early into my youth with hair analysis back 1983, a young woman brought her 9-year old ADHD kid in to see me. He had gone through the route of Ritalin and all the other medications and they were about to throw him out of school. He was a classic hyperactive kid.
At that time, I had a behavior rating scale. It had 36 points in it. When the mother filled it out, he was still rated 36/36 – very, very high. So we had a hair analysis on him. He was a fast oxidizer, a fast metabolic rate, low calcium, magnesium, high sodium, but potassium was even higher and his copper was 0.8. The ideal of copper is 2.5. Real low copper, which is very typical of a fast oxidizer.
We put him on a supplement program. Three months later, we re-tested. In three months, his copper went from 0.8 to 24.
Wendy Myers: Wow!
Dr. Rick Malter: That’s what we call a ‘copper gump’ or a ‘copper detox’. He went temporarily into a slope as his copper came up.
I had the mother re-rate him. The rating dropped down from 36/36 to somewhere down around 25/36 indicating he was calming down. So there was a thirty-fold increase in the copper level in three months.
He made a very interesting observation. As I was talking with him about what the changes were. He said, “Now, I understand when people say, ‘If you do this, then this will be the consequence.’” When he was so copper toxic and hyperactive, he could not comprehend and apply if-then consequences. His system was too revved up and out of control.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, a lot of my clients report they had mind racing – many friends as well. They’re all copper toxic. People report their mind is racing. They can’t calm down. They’re doing all kinds of things (i.e. compulsive exercising) to try to calm down.
Dr. Rick Malter: But that’s also the kind of driven-ness that you get with copper toxicity. It revs the mind up so much that the person feels driven in a very, very addicting and compulsive manner until they crash.
So one of the slides in my copper toxicity class shows somebody totally exhausted with their head on the desk and right beside that is a little finger running and racing. That’s a graphic summary of the effects of copper toxicity – physical exhaustion (because the cells can’t produce adequate energy), but the mind is racing and thoughts race and there are sleep disturbances. A lot of ADD kinds of distractibility can be traced to copper toxicity.
Wendy Myers: I had a few questions about – it’s very frustrating for me why hair mineral analysis has such a poor reputation among doctors and other healthcare practitioners. Even on QuackWatch.com, I’ve had many clients go and do a search and find QuackWatch that hair tissue mineral analysis is invalid and it’s quackery and la-la-la-la-la. So why is that?
Dr. Rick Malter: Okay. Well, you know from your psychology studies about the concept of projection. I believe Stephen Barrett, Dr. Stephen Barrett of QuackWatch is projecting about “quackery”.
Hair analysis was really picking up a lot of steam and interest from 1982-1985. The seminars were drawing a couple of hundred of people on weekends. So there was a lot of interest in it.
And then in August of 1985, JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) published Dr. Berrett’s article about ‘commercial hair analysis’. They had commercial in quotes as if big pharma is not commercial. Only hair analysis labs are commercial.
So some clients of mine had seen a newspaper article describing the results of Barrett’s study, which really slammed hair analysis. So I got concerned and I went over to the local hospital medical library and pulled out the journal to read the article.
Well, first of all, he based his study on hair samples from two 17-year old girls. He used shoulder length hair. You know that the hair analysis lab say, “Cut the first inch to inch and a half of hair from the scalp (not shoulder-length hair) to get a valid, current sample.”
It was obvious he used really extended amounts of hair growth. And then he cut them into 1-inch segments. So he figured that there’s at least five to six inches of growth from the back of your head down to your shoulders. So he cut all these hair lengths into five or six segments and then mixed them all together.
And don’t forget. This was based on samples from two 17-year old girls.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it doesn’t sound like a study to me. You have to have a sample study of 20 people at least to have a valid result. The results being generalized the population.
Dr. Rick Malter: That’s right. But what he did is he cut enough hair with those shoulder-length samples for sending off to 13 different labs. And as you know, some of the labs over-wash the samples as part of their handling and processing of the hair samples and others don’t wash them. That makes a huge difference in the measurement of the sodium and potassium quantities in the hair sample.
In Barrett’s study, he didn’t report specific numbers that were generated by the labs’ computerized equipment. He summarized his results in terms of whether the mineral was showing high, normal or low. Now, that’s a much cruder set of measurements than if you’re reporting very specific numbers. So that right away alters the accuracy of the results because it depends on how each lab generated its norm to determine high, normal and low.
It was very interesting. When you look even at that crude data that he reported, both girls had high calcium, high magnesium and what do you think their copper levels were?
Wendy Myers: High, yeah.
Dr. Rick Malter: Yeah! So without even reading the article, you know from that that the copper was high. If anything, he validated hair analysis showing that these two 17-year old girls had high copper and were slow oxidizer types with the high calcium and magnesium.
Wendy Myers: And that was so long ago. Why does that still persist? There are so many doctors that still don’t consider it valid.
Dr. Rick Malter: Because it was published in JAMA. As soon as it was published, it was accompanied by a massive press release and media campaign. Once the media gets hold of an issue, it gets imprinted in the public’s mind and also in the mind of professionals. It was like a warning sign to medical doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists and other practitioners, “Don’t you dare dabble in or mess with hair analysis. It’s invalid. It’s not scientific.”
Wendy Myers: Because that’s even what I run into before. I had my hair test, my first one. I was considering getting one. It’s not that simple. But when I considered doing one, I was asking around and the general consensus was they’re not very accurate, but it doesn’t hurt. You might as well try it.
But I mean, accurate for what?
Dr. Rick Malter: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: It depends on what your goals are. The minerals in the hair are going to be different to the minerals in the blood.
Dr. Rick Malter: Well, medical doctors when they do different kinds of research projects seem to get confused about the accuracy of a test versus its clinical validity. Accuracy have to do with whether you get the same results if you divide the sample into two and you run both samples. The accuracy of hair analysis is phenomenally good and you could get data on hair analysis accuracy from any of the licensed labs. They have to maintain high levels of accuracy and data to support that. So it’s no question, a technical laboratory chemical analysis is highly accurate.
What they’re confusing is the issue of whether it’s valid or not. So for example, we know that copper in excess stores primarily in the brain and in the liver. Well, if you want to validate a person’s copper level with tissue analysis besides hair, what tissue are you going to take? Are you going to take a liver biopsy? Are you going to take a brain cell biopsy? Are you going to take a little sample of tissue from the hand or the arm?
And so that’s one aspect of it. Does the hair analysis’ copper level as an example correlate with body loads of copper? Well, if you check liver and brain tissue, you’ll get very high correlations.
But another way to validate it is to list the copper toxic symptoms. These will be both psychological and physiological. You’ll have hypothyroid. It’s a major symptom related to copper toxicity.
And invariably, women who are copper toxic have very slow metabolism. They are showing signs of severe hypothyroid and low energy of the thyroid then becomes a drag on the adrenal glands. Sooner or later, you’ll find that the person not only has a slow thyroid, but their adrenals had been dragged into an adrenal burnout. So their energy production is really drained like a battery.
Wendy Myers: That’s what I see with every single one of my clients. They have low thyroid function. Many of my clients have very, very low adrenal function – stage three adrenals. By the time they’ve come around to find me and hair tissue mineral analysis, they’ve been to every doctor. All those stuff, nobody has helped them because they’re no one is addressing nutritional status and detox for the most part.
Dr. Rick Malter: That’s right. And what you’ll also find is that many of these women also have a low calcium, low magnesium ratio. So even though the magnesium is showing high in the hair analysis, it’s much lower than the calcium. So you have a calcium, magnesium imbalance (too much calcium, not enough magnesium). That affects blood sugar regulation and insulin. It leads to very tight, spastic muscles and it means that they also will experience all kinds of magnesium deficiency symptoms.
So then the question becomes how do you give them magnesium (which they need) without putting the adrenals completely to sleep? because your magnesium will slow down the adrenals. So you have to strike a balance between some magnesium supplementation and enough adrenal support to maintain a build-up of energy. That can fluctuate literally from day to day.
So what I work on is training my clients to be aware of when they think they need more magnesium and when they need less, when do they need more adrenal support and when do they need less.
So you mentioned before how many people have been going all over trying to get help. Well, a lot of them get on these Facebook chat groups for adrenal burnout and adrenal fatigue and then they try all different ways to give themselves nutritional support for the adrenals whether it’s herbal, vitamins and minerals, whatever it is. That may give them a temporary boost in adrenal function, which then can start to raise their low sodium level. But as the sodium starts coming up, magnesium goes down.
So if they’re trying to revive their adrenals without knowing the magnesium status, very quickly, they’ll feel awful because they have gotten some pick-up of adrenal activity at the expense of losing magnesium.
Wendy Myers: That’s what I love about mineral balancing and using HTMA’s because one mineral affects another one and you have to supplement in just the right way to bring everything up eventually.
Dr. Rick Malter: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: So interesting.
Dr. Rick Malter: And to be aware of those dynamic interrelationships. That’s what, in my view, puts hair analysis head and shoulders above all kinds of other approaches to nutrition and health care because minerals as Dr. Schroeder have mentioned are the spark plugs of life and hair analysis allows us to see a person’s mineral status.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, because people can do homeopathy, they can do acupuncture. You can do all kinds of stuff, it’s not going to help if they have low mineral status.
Dr. Rick Malter: Exactly.
Wendy Myers: It’s not going to work.
Dr. Rick Malter: Yeah. So I view hair analysis and minerals as the spark plug of life as being at the center of the target. You know how the target scores? You have that big target. Well, minerals and hair analysis in my view are at the center of the target. There’s lots of other good interventions and treatments and practices, but they’re much more in the periphery of the target. If you don’t hit the bulls eye, you could literally spin your wheels going round and round the periphery of the target.
Some people will get some benefit, no doubt about that. But for most people, hitting the bulls eye by appreciating the importance and value of our nutrient minerals. Hair analysis allows us to really get a sense of what a person’s mineral patterns and statuses.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and I don’t mean to disparage acupuncture. I think those are very, very good treatment modalities, but it’s just that I think other things are more important like raising someone’s mineral status.
Dr. Rick Malter: Yeah. Now, one of the metaphors that I use is there’s such a vast body of knowledge in complex information out there especially as it relates to the mind-body interrelationships. The amount of information from the most minute biochemistry all the way up to heart function, brain, kidney function and so on is a vast body of information.
Wendy Myers: So who started hair mineral analysis?
Dr. Rick Malter: I really don’t know where it started as a chemical lab analysis. I think it started in horticulture in animal husbandry or zoology. They found that you could cut hair from the coat of an animal and measure the mineral content. I think that’s how the basic laboratory technique got started.
But it wasn’t until 1975 when Dr. Eck and Watts got together in Phoenix and began looking at the case data of Dr. Watt’s chiropractic patients and looking at the blood work and the urine work and what the presenting health problems were that they began to make the connections.
And so they were able to develop this phenomenal conceptual and organizational framework to really understand the significance of mineral patterns relating it to the autonomic nervous system, sympathetic and parasympathetic, to the endocrines, the adrenals, thyroid and parathyroid, the energy pathways, the Krebbs and glycolysis cycles, how energy is produced in these delicate pathways. If one component is missing (like magnesium), everything falls apart.
One of the things that Morley has refocused on is the connection by the way magnesium and ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which are necessary in combination to produce power and energy in the mitochrondria within the cells – and especially within the heart cells. If you’re acutely magnesium deficient, sooner or later, you’re going to hit a point where the heart no longer is adequate energy to keep its rhythm beating efficiently and to produce enough power. It’s not cholesterol and it’s not going to be corrected by statin drugs.
And so the magnesium factor related to ATP is vital for understanding cellular energy and especially heart energy.
Wendy Myers: So Dr. Eck and Dr. Watts, how long did they collaborate together?
Dr. Rick Malter: They collaborated for about nine years, from ’75 to about ’84. Watts, being a chiropractor started writing articles about their hair analysis research and publishing them in some of the chiropractic literature, some of the nutritional literature, the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. It was started by the late Dr. Abram Hoffer in Canada. It was getting a lot of recognition when you publish. That really expands your audience.
Eck really didn’t write or publish very much. Even the Health E newsletter article is really an interview with him where his is orally explaining things. His strength was orally explaining things, not in writing.
It reached the point that Watts also felt that it was necessary to modify the formulae of the supplements based on what hair analysis research was showing especially in regard to the dumping off excess copper or copper detox.
If you ever listened to any of the audio tapes of the seminars from the 1980’s, copper was Dr. Eck’s baby, so to speak.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Rick Malter: He kept emphasizing, when you dump copper, you go into a sodium, potassium inversion. That means your sodium is low, but potassium jumps up. And then they would supplement accordingly. Watts observed this wasn’t working. Something was wrong with the way they were interpreting that phenomenon.
He realized from the hair analysis research that copper lowers potassium. So how could it be if a person detoxes a lot of copper that potassium would go up? He realized, well, the cell is losing potassium, it’s building in the blood temporarily, going to the kidneys and being eliminated in the urine, but the hair also is a pathway of excretion.
So temporarily, the potassium goes up in the hair with the copper detox when it’s really reflecting a further loss of potassium. So if you supplement with potassium, the person gets better.
Eck wouldn’t hear it. He sent Dr. Watts on his way. So Watts left the ARL Lab in Phoenix when they had an established Trace Elements, his own lab and he’s developed that over the last 30 years with great success. And once he established the TEI Lab, he applied those interpretation modifications to his hair analysis interpretation. And then Dr. Wilson came along by the time that Watts left and he only got X interpretation.
And so as far as I know, he never picked up on the potassium loss phenomenon with detoxing copper. It’s a major difference between our approach with TEI and the Analytic Research Labs approach.
Wendy Myers: Okay. And you’re referring to Dr. Lawrence Wilson at drlwilson.com. He’s very prolific. He’s written almost a thousand articles on…
Dr. Rick Malter: Yeah, Dr. Lawrence Wilson is a brilliant man. I understand he got his bachelor’s degree from MIT. So you know he’s quite a brilliant man and you can see how prolific he is in the amount he’s written. My book is a thin, little book.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Dr. Rick Malter: …compared to his, but I think I hit the bulls eye more directly with mine.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, your book, it’s very succinct and it’s digestible. I think it’s a very good think for a lay person to read and kind of get an idea of hair mineral analysis and how it can help them.
Dr. Rick Malter: My book really was a transcription of my early seminars when I had overhead transparencies that showed the mineral pattern for a fast oxidizer and for a slow. So I put it into book form after I retired.
Wendy Myers: So what are some of the exciting developments in hair mineral analysis? What’s going on? What are some changes that have happened and some of the other big proponents of it?
Dr. Rick Malter: Well, unfortunately, the labs have never gotten together because they are commercial labs. They are businesses with huge overheads. The market is somewhat confined. So they are basically competitors. As far as I know, they never have gotten together as professionals to look at their data and to look at different studies and clinical cases.
I think one of the best ways to learn to appreciate hair analysis is to look at individual studies that are usually dismissed by medical doctors as only anecdotal. Well, we can learn a great deal from individual cases.
Wendy Myers: Well, it’s sad that Dr. Eck, he passed away about 15 years ago.
Dr. Rick Malter: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: And Dr. Watts, he’s still running TEI. So essentially, at ARL, there really haven’t been much in the way of – not improving their labs, but just improving their research and updating and looking for some new information. But at least Dr. Watts, he still runs TEI today.
Dr. Rick Malter: Yeah. And ARL still produces very good Eck results even after the passing of Dr. Eck, but I never got a sense there was anybody there to step in and continue to do some of the basic research and to consider some of the challenges with the formulas and the supplements that they recommend.
And the hair analysis in my experience is a highly individualized lab too. I find I really have to tailor my explanations to the individual. Some people want a very detailed, complex explanation of, “What does this mean? What does that mean?” Others say, “Just tell me what I should eat and tell me what supplements to take.” So you have a wide variety.
I have some reservations about the hair analysis labs having extensive printouts along with reporting the basic mineral data in toxic metals. I think the printouts wind up being an introduction to hair analysis concepts and principles. I think that’s a function that should be left as an educational function separate from the laboratory work-up.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, because I know at ARL, they give you this 17-page report, but it’s a computer-generated report, so it’s limited. It’s very general.
Dr. Rick Malter: Yeah, it’s very general. It doesn’t zero in on what the concerns of the individual clients or patient. And so what I recommend to people who take my training course is when they’re first starting out, get the full computerized printout, so you could see what TEI is saying in its full printout. And then, also, you get some idea what are Dr. Watt’s dietary recommendations, which foods is he recommending to omit and leave out depending on your hair analysis. That’s valuable information.
But once you have a few cases like that, once you get a good handle on interpreting what you’re seeing in the hair analysis, then I think it’s best to just do the two pages of the numerical report and the graph. And then, tailor the recommendations to what you’re seeing are the primary imbalances and toxicities. What you sense is going to be acceptable with the individual client in terms of numbers of supplements.
I just reviewed a couple of hair analysis today, a mother and child. I only recommended [inaudible 00:54:05] for the child and a Para-Pack for the mother and [inaudible 00:54:10] for both of them even though I could’ve come up with a rationale for several more supplements. What I sense in my discussion with the mother was, “Let’s just start off with a small amount.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Yeah, and that’s where a lot of people are. Some people, they’re just not going to take a big 10 pills a day with every meal and so you have to start people where they’re at and that’s okay.
Dr. Rick Malter: Yeah. Now, one of the best supplements I’ve found over the years is Endomet’s Spartan MK, magnesium potassium aspartate. Thirty years ago, Dr. Eck was raving about Spartan MK because it’s a combination that gets magnesium and potassium into the cells and starts to give an energy boost in the mitochondria.
And so, a person’s got chronic fatigue, just taking a few Spartan MK a day can give them some encouragement because they feel a boost in energy. I noticed that Dr. Wilsom rarely, if ever, recommends Spartan MK.
Wendy Myers: No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t.
Dr. Rick Malter: No. And one of the reasons why I recommend Spartan MK especially for copper toxic, very burnt out, low energy women is it provides an energy boost without throwing them into a quick copper detox. And as you know, a copper detox is not going to be very comfortable.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Some of my clients are pretty miserable. It’s a necessary evil though, so that they can feel better afterwards.
Dr. Rick Malter: Yeah, what I would do with my transparency thirty years ago is draw a rollercoaster up and down. I would explain to them, “You have a high copper. You have to choose. Are you going to ride the copper rollercoaster and get rid of that excess copper and restore your energy or are you going to keep plodding along in burnout?” I would talk about the copper rollercoaster.
Wendy Myers: Well, Dr. Malter, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Dr. Rick Malter: It’s been a pleasure.
Wendy Myers: And so why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit more about you and where they can find you?
Dr. Rick Malter: Okay. You can find me in Cottonwood, Arizona at the Malter Institute. My web page is MalterInstitute.org. I’ve got some of my articles on there and some information about hair analysis. My wife and I have our books described there, Shrinking the Judge: Freeing the Inner Child is about the ‘inner judge’ or ‘inner terrorist’. And of course, The Strands of Health book. Those, you can order directly from me. My phone number is 928-649-9343. The web page is www.malterinstitute.org.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And listeners, I highly recommend his book, The Strands of Helath. It’s really, really good. I’ve really, really enjoyed it. I’m almost done with it. I’m probably going to finish reading it this week.
Dr. Rick Malter: Okay!
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Dr. Rick Malter: Okay. And I just want to mention my email address also. It’s [email protected].
Wendy Myers: Well, thank you so much, Rick.
Dr. Rick Malter: It’s been a pleasure, Wendy.
Wendy Myers: Thank you. And if you can consult with him personally, if you want to get your hair tissue mineral analysis and see what Dr. Malter has to say about your health and psychological well-being – and you can also try out my Mineral Power Program if you like, you can check that out at myersdetox.com. You can find me on Facebook and Twitter, @iwillliveto110. You can also find me on all the social media. I’m all over the place.
If you liked what you heard on the show today, please give me a review on iTunes. It’ll be so helpful for others to find me and listen to my message. And that’s it for today. Thank you for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
Dr. Rick Malter: Thank you.
