Although most of us believe we are not deficient in iodine since the fortification of salt with iodine, the fact is most people are deficient and don't know it. Due to changes in food intake, eating patterns and food production methods, iodine intake has been decreasing in the U.S. since the early 70's. Even worse, we are exposed to increasing levels of environmental toxins that either block the absorption of iodine or block its actions in the body.

According to IMS Health, the most widely dispensed class of medications on a volume basis in 2008 was cholesterol-lowering drugs. (In fact, four of the top 10 most widely prescribed classes of drugs were for cardiovascular disease.)

We have all seen the many ads for statin drugs, low-fat foods, cholesterol-free foods, etc., all proclaiming they lower cholesterol, which is supposed to be good for our hearts. This must mean then that cholesterol is bad for us, right?

Well, no. Cholesterol is so important for our health that the body produces more of it each day than most of us consume in our diet. It is used to make cell walls, insulate nerves, carry fats in the blood, make steroidal hormones and vitamin D, and repair injuries—the list is long.

A while ago, I visited two manufacturers within a few days of each other to evaluate their level of quality control. Although both are respected in the industry and are GMP certified, I was quite surprised to see how different they were in reality.

There is much to appreciate in conventional medicine—almost miraculous advances in the treatment of acute illness, trauma and life-threatening disease. Key to this advancement has been standardization of diagnosis, of therapy and of people. Inherent in conventional medicine is the assumption that only the disease is important and relief of symptoms is the primary measure of success. Conventional medicine has therefore developed standardized therapies for standard diagnoses of generic patients that are sometimes curative and often highly effective in symptom relief—at least for a while. Unfortunately, this standardization of people is not only inaccurate but results in treatment failures and the huge, under-recognized incidence of adverse drug reactions from "properly prescribed" medications. This lack of recognition of each person's unique biochemistry is a primary cause of adverse drug reactions, which are reported by patients to occur in up to 25 percent of outpatient visits and are estimated to be the fourth leading cause of death in the US.

Conventional medicine has dismissed mercury toxicity as a clinical concern except in cases of obvious poisoning. This is due to the poor correlation between the various measures of mercury body load and clinical symptoms. It is also the reason the dental community has in the past so consistently denied that amalgam fillings are a health risk. (Although called "silver" fillings, they are actually about 55 percent mercury.) However, the integrative medicine community has for decades believed that chronic low-level mercury exposure is the root cause of many chronic diseases ranging from autism to heart disease to "brain fog."

This controversy became very personally relevant when I discovered, as part of an innovative corporate wellness program I helped to design, that my RBC (red blood cell) Hg level was 59.3 nmol/L over twice the "safe" level of < 24.9. This was quite surprising as I live a very healthy lifestyle, have no amalgam fillings, only consume small, wild-caught fish, eat 75 percent of my food organically grown, etc. I then had the same test done on my wife and found her level was almost as high as mine. This lead to the obvious questions: Was the test valid? Is the mercury damaging our health? Where is the mercury coming from? How do we get rid of it?