Balancing Biochemistry: An Interview with Stephanie Cave

By Amy Morrison
Issue 115, November - December 2002

This interview was conducted on August 18, 2002, by Amy Morrison, Mothering's associate editor.

MM: How and when did your medical career begin?

SC: 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 that 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 toothpastes and dental amalgams. The antimony comes from flame-retardant sleepwear and baby sheets. The arsenic is from food and water. In addition, treated wood, used to build decks or swing sets, contains high levels of arsenic. However, these children don't have to be around a high exposure to metal--they just have to be around metal per se, because they do not have the biochemistry to aid them in the removal of metals. I believe that's because we have overloaded them with metal through the vaccines. We give them so much metal early in life, specifically through the hepatitis B vaccine given at birth, that their bodies keep producing metallothionein, which is what helps us to remove metals from the body. After their biochemistry is depleted, they end up with an inability to handle any metal at all.

Biochemist Bill Walsh of the Pfeiffer Treatment Center made this discovery. He tested 503 autistic children and found that 91 percent had a deficiency of metallothionein, whereas normal children do not. [See Mothering 112 (May-June 2002): 30.]

MM: What about mercury and aluminum? What's the source of these exposures?

SC: Infant vaccines contained mercury and aluminum. The epidemic with autism really started during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it seemed to coincide with the time that the vaccines for Hib (Hemophilus influenzae type b) and hepatitis B were added to the vaccine schedule--Hib around 1988, hepatitis B in 1991. The children had already had the DTP (diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis) vaccine through the 1980s, and the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) was subsequently added; but we did not realize much of an upswing until the hepatitis B vaccine was added at birth.

MM: Parents are frequently told that the amount of mercury given to infants in vaccines is a "trace amount" and nothing to get upset about.

SC: Well, what is a safe level of a poison? Twelve and a half micrograms of ethyl mercury at birth is 25 times the EPA "safe level." The 62.5 mcg of ethyl mercury that a 10-pound infant was receiving at two months of age can be up to 125 times the EPA "safe" level. That's a seriously toxic dose of mercury. This metal is especially hard on premature infants. The post-vaccination level of mercury in the premature infant's blood can rise to ten times that of the term infants.