Today I’m going to talk to you about a simple blood test that can save your life. I’ve been practicing for over thirty years now. Recently, I had a patient come in that’s just an incredible story of how sick someone can be and how quickly it can be turned around once you find out the underlying root causes of what’s going on in your body.
What is Ferritin?
This blood test is called ferritin, which can be a measure of the iron levels that are stored in your body. So if your body is low in iron, and I have a video on this as well, you can get a whole lot of symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, anxiety, depression, headaches, weakness, shortness of breath, and heart palpitations. On the other hand, high iron levels can cause very similar symptoms and actually be very toxic to your system.
I had a patient around ten years ago whose husband was diagnosed with hemochromatosis, which is iron overload, and he actually ended up dying from this and he was only in his thirties. So this is a really serious thing. Over a million people in the United States have iron overload, hemochromatosis, and it’s very simple to detect and treat if you do the right ferritin levels tests and catch it early enough.
What Conditions Iron Overload Can Cause
So just to give you some of the examples of the conditions that iron overload can cause… First of all, when your iron levels get too high in your system, it damages your organs and joints and can cause diabetes, arthritis, heart palpitations, an irregular heartbeat is a very common symptom.
I saw a patient about six or seven years ago, a young man in his twenties, he was thin but had high blood pressure, his heart rate was very fast with many palpitations and flutters. He went to cardiologists, wore heart monitors but they could never figure out what was wrong. After thorough evaluations and testing in my office, his ferritin levels and other iron tests were high. His ferritin levels were over 500 ng/ml and you want to get your ferritin levels around 60-90 ng/ml.
Once we reduced his ferritin, his symptoms cleared up. So high ferritin and iron levels can cause heart symptoms, gallbladder disease, depression, infertility. Low testosterone levels can be caused by high iron. Cancer and disease can be caused by iron overload.
The main symptoms again of too much iron is lack of energy, abdominal pain, brain fog, heart flutters, fast heart rate, joint pain, loss of sex drive. Just overall feeling miserable. It can lead to liver damage, cirrhosis, hepatitis, liver cancer, enlarged spleen, hypothyroidism, and hormone imbalances. It can cause neurodegenerative diseases, early dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ringing in the ears, and vertigo. All these can be caused by iron overload and it is so simple to find.
Patient Experience
So this patient that I want to tell you about who recently came in, she’s a 64-year-old female and she had been feeling miserable for over twenty years. She had been to a number of different doctors over the last couple of years, had gallbladder surgery, pancreatitis, pericarditis—inflammation of the heart. She was in the hospital multiple times, literally almost died. Ringing in the ears, vertigo, fatigue, brain fog, just feeling terrible and many other symptoms on top of that, feeling completely miserable.
So when a patient comes in we have a Functional & Free™ program that we’ve put patients on which determines the root cause and then provides long-term permanent solutions. So in step one is our initial evaluation and includes ferritin levels and iron profile. Her levels were over 1,000 ng/ml where 60-90 ng/ml is optimal. This is really serious and she had elevated liver enzymes showing liver damage and elevated uric acid which can damage the joints and lead to disease. Her inflammatory markers in her body were eight times the normal level.
How to Lower High Ferritin Levels
How to lower high ferritin levels for iron overload is to do therapeutic phlebotomy. The challenge with that is for every pint you donate you can drop about 30 points of your ferritin levels and at a certain point, you can become anemic. She was able to donate a pint of blood three times before she became severely anemic and couldn’t donate anymore.
So that three times would have brought it down only ninety points and she was 1094ng/ml, and that would have brought it down to 1004 ng/ml. I wanted to see her ferritin at less than 100 ng/ml.
I put her again through our 7-step Functional & Free™ program and part of that included the FreeDiet™, which is a proprietary diet that is free of those foods most responsible for inflammation, digestive, and other chronic health issues.
I put her on some specific targeted Natural Medicine Formulas and supplements for the purpose of balancing her system, chelating excess metals like iron. She used the infrared sauna here at the Natural Medicine Clinic. She was doing that on a regular basis and an infrared sauna is great for eliminating toxins, heavy metals including iron.
Between all of this, the FreeDiet™, the infrared sauna, proper supplementation to heal her gut, her levels decreased tremendously. The whole program was very detoxifying in it’s cleansing.
In Just Four Weeks
In four weeks we checked her blood again, and her ferritin levels decreased from 1094 to 92ng/ml, a reduction of over one thousand points in four weeks! This was amazing and her elevated liver enzymes decreased over 60% to almost normal. Her inflammatory marker dropped by almost 60% percent to close to normal levels. Uric acid decreased to normal, and so all these levels improved dramatically in four weeks. Her ferritin levels are fine now and it just goes to show you that the body has such an incredible ability to heal itself.
If you find out the underlying root causes and are provided the right course of action—proper diet, supplements, lifestyle changes—you can get better. The human body is so amazing that you can heal almost any chronic health condition or disease and you can get better. So remember next time you get lab testing, ask your doctor to order ferritin levels and iron profile to make sure that you are okay.
If you need help in that area and want us to do it, feel free to contact us. If you like the video and know someone that might benefit from this feel free to share it and subscribe to our channel. Thank you so much for joining me today and we look forward to seeing you next time, take care.
Thank you for reading our blog on how to lower high ferritin levels! How can we help you?
