Migraines from mercury
Today I want to share with you an inspiring (and harrowing) story of healing from my coaching practice. With Kim’s permission, I am sharing details from her coaching intake, her Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis results, and the steps that she has undertaken to start healing from mercury toxicity and the mineral imbalances it caused. In part 2 of this series I will interview her and her boyfriend about their emotional and spiritual journey healing chronic migraines.
Kim’s levels of mercury were the highest I had ever seen (or have yet to see), and she was the sickest of anyone who had ever come to me for coaching. It’s interesting that she is also the person who I’ve seen improve the most drastically. This improvement can be attributed to her intense commitment to her wellbeing, and to the insight that Hair Tissue Mineral Analaysis provided to give an explanation to the root cause of her suffering.
From the beginning of our coaching relationship, Kim has emanated a beautiful quality of radiance and spiritual strength as she suffers through unimaginable pain while healing herself. Luckily, she is seeing very good results with the mineral balancing and Gerson Protocol, and her symptoms are greatly improving. She is an inspiration to all.
Kim is currently training to become a health coach! I know she will be a great coach, given her firsthand experience healing herself of mercury poisoning.
With no further ado, meet Kim!
Kim’s background
Kim’s headaches developed in childhood, and migraines started five years ago. In addition to the migraines, Kim was also burdened with digestive issues, allergic reactions including itchy throat, sinus congestion, fatigue, depression, joint and muscle pain, tinnitus, easy bruising, light sensitivity, low blood sugar and cravings, gas, constipation, fungal infections, belching, slow wound healing, heart palpitations, sleep deprivation, nightmares, candida, panic attacks, racing thoughts and clenching and grinding of teeth (bruxism).
With the amount of pain she’s experienced, Kim has also explored many medications and went through a period of addiction to painkillers. She has taken Propranolol 80mg for five years to control allergic rhinitis. She was also on sumatriptan, nortriptaline, antibiotics, morphine, codeine, ibuprofen, and paracetamol. She was on hormonal birth control, which we now know can cause serious health problems including migraine.
Kim has a history of family emotional trauma. She was the third child born, conceived in the year after her father had a major health crisis and developed Crohn’s Disease and Type 1 Diabetes. He was heavily medicated on steroids and pain-controlling meds. In addition to that, the year prior to Kim being conceived her mother had taken a year long course of antibiotics to help clear up her acne. Her health was very compromised as well with chronic fatigue and digestive issues. Kim was likely born with some deficiencies.
Kim says:
The fact that I didn’t look after myself particularly well i.e diet and exercise paired with the unfortunate epstien bar virus, mercury exposure and anti-biotic use . . . most probably explains why I developed chronic migraines. And then all the medications I took just made things worse. But I’m past that now and recovery is all I can see/focus on.
History of dental work and migraines
Kim describes the dental work in her own words:
From the age of 20 I had four amalgam fillings, one of which the tooth got badly infected and caused a lot of pain. I had to get it seen to as an emergency, they drilled into it and cleaned it out, then I had a root canal in the coming weeks with an amalgam crown, because that’s all I could afford. I had NO IDEA what I was doing at the time. It all seems very cruel now. Amalgam shouldn’t be allowed in peoples mouths, period!
Let’s rewind: Just before the infection flared up, I was experiencing fatigue/headaches and I had a few migraines that I can pinpoint in my memory. After the root canal, this was the period of time in which the migraines become chronic and I was struck down with severe fatigue, depression and anxiety. I remember the brain fog being so intense I felt like I had lost my ability to be my normal clever hardworking self.
Since then, I have had two of my amalgams replaced, but one still remains. During the removal they used a rubber dam but I don’t think that alone would have been enough to protect me from toxicity. I remember being patronised for asking for the rubber dam and told how rare it is for people to have mercury toxicity.
I always felt that the dental stuff was the catalyst for my chronic migraines developing, however, I feel that I was most likely already suffering from dysbiosis of the gut and mineral/vitamin deficiencies because I had been dealing with headaches, fatigue, anxiety, depression, ear, nose & throat allergies and heart palpitations from my young teens (all of which were chronic!).
HTMA results
For the sake of brevity and simplicity, I’ll just include a basic snapshot of Kim’s major nutritional elements here. The figure below displays Kim’s major nutritional elements in relation to “1” being the optimal level set by Eck and Watts – in other words, ideally, all levels would go up to a “1.” This simple graph is an easy way to get a visual representation of whether someone has a deficiency or an excess for a given mineral.
As you can see here, Kim’s zinc, copper, iron and phosphorus are below 1, and her calcium levels are off the charts. Her absolute values for calcium here in her first HTMA were 202 mg%, whereas the optimal level is 42 mg%.

The body uses calcium to buffer acidity, and copper raises calcium – so elevated calcium levels are usually seen as a red flag for potential copper toxicity (ie, hidden stored biounavailable tissue copper that then can express on a retest as it is mobilized out of storage through a mineral balancing plan).
I initially suspected copper toxicity, but in retrospect it appears upon retest that her elevated calcium could be coming exclusively from her body’s attempt to buffer the acidity of her high mercury levels.
High calcium levels are often known as a “calcium shell.” This calcium shell is seen as a protective mechanism that people sometimes develop in response to trauma. As the shell breaks down with a mineral balancing program, emotions come to the surface and are cleared as part of the healing process.
Notice here that Kim’s magnesium levels were optimal – but, if we look at the ratio of her calcium to magnesium, it was still very out of balance, because her calcium levels were so high. This helped to explain her intense sugar cravings during her moon time.
Kim’s mercury levels first tested out at .18 mg%. Levels above .02 mg% are considered toxic. She had 9 times the levels considered toxic. I frequently see people with levels of .06 mg% or even .1 mg%, but had never seen this much mercury in a test.
In addition to the mercury, Kim had elevated levels of lead, barium, nickel, lithium, zirconium, and extremely high levels of strontium. Many of these latter elements or metals, while they are not technically heavy metals, can be toxic, and scramble enzyme function. They are commonly used in dental fillings, in the form of porcelains and resins (although they can also come from other sources).
The effects of these additional elements on human metabolism are not as well understood or studied as the heavy metals or nutritional elements. Initially, I did not pay much attention to these additional elements, since my training in Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis focused ONLY on the nutritional elements, and these additional elements like barium and strontium are fairly obscure.
Mineral balancing plan
My mineral balancing plan for Kimberley involved suggestions and strategies to balance her major electrolytes, make copper bioavailable through building ceruloplasmin, gently remove any excess copper to see if it would elicit a copper dump, and support removal of her mercury with selenium and other minerals.
To help improve Kim’s calcium/magnesium (blood sugar) ratio, I suggested focusing on lowering the calcium with gentle zinc intake, knowing also that through removal of the mercury, her calcium levels would go down and her blood sugar would improve. I referred Kim to a heavy metal detox expert, and indicated that they would probably suggest some degree of enemas and sweating including near-infrared sauna therapy to move out the metals.
After a month or so on the mineral balancing plan, Kim got back to me:
I wanted to write you because I have some very exciting news to share with you. Over the past 16 days, I have only had 3 migraines! I have been on a modified version of the Gerson Therapy, combined with the mineral and vitamin balancing protocol you gave me. I have been doing coffee enemas every single day! The improvements were immediate. Just wanted to share this with you. It’s an exciting time. I’m also taking NuLeaf CBD oil, maybe that’s helping too.
Second HTMA results
Three months after her first HTMA, Kim wrote to me sharing the news of her retest results. (Kim had her hair biopsy done independently by a lab in England before passing them on to me for the reanalysis).
My calcium shell has de-creased, and most exciting of all is that my mercury levels have gone down!! From 0.18 to 0.07. How amazing is that?!I feel the best I’ve felt in a really long time, the Gerson therapy combined with the mineral re-balancing seems to be working extremely well. I am not completely free from migraines or headaches yet, but the migraines are no longer chronic.Perhaps my biggest news which I forgot is that my cravings for sugar and unhealthy processed food has completely GONE AWAY.
When I did the analysis, I saw that not only had her calcium and mercury levels gone down, but she had significant decreases in levels of the other obscure metals/elements, esp. those associated with dental fillings like zirconium and strontium.
Here is a comparison chart of her two tests for the nutritional elements.

Optimal reference levels are at the top in bold. Results marked in green or with a green star indicate improvement over previous levels. Blue indicates a more concerning deficiency, and red indicates excess or toxicity.
The fact that Kim’s sodium levels went down is consistent with her choosing to avoid salt on the Gerson Protocol. Her copper levels also went down, which also lowered her sodium levels. This makes sense, since she was initially taking zinc without copper, as we needed to be cautious to make sure she did not have hidden copper deficiency, especially with her history of hormonal birth control.
Here is a comparison of Kim’s toxic elements including results from both tests:
And here is a breakdown of Kim’s additional elements:
We can see here the strong presence of elements used in dentistry, even above and beyond the mercury amalgams. Although these elements can come from many sources, the elevated strontium in particular is very likely a result of her porcelain and/or resin dental fillings. The fact that she was able to reduce these levels through enemas, sweating, and mineral balancing is wonderful!
I will not include an analysis of Kim’s ratios for oxidation type (Ca/P), blood sugar ratio (Ca/Mg), thyroid ratio (Ca/K), stage of stress (Na/K), adrenal ratio (Na/Mg), bacterial ratio (Fe/Cu), or emotional/hormonal ratio (Zn/Cu), as that would be too lengthy. But overall, about half of her ratios are now more in balance than on the first test, with the exception of the ratios involving sodium (since she stopped eating sodium on Gerson Protocol), and her zinc / copper ratio.
Kim’s copper/zinc ratio (emotional/hormonal ratio)
Because Kim’s copper actually went down (rather than spiking) I’m inclined to believe that Kim’s elevated calcium was a result of her mercury toxicity, not hidden copper toxicity. However, this is not possible to determine for certain immediately, since copper does not always mobilize within the first hair retest. Also, I am never in favor of taking huge doses of zinc to mobilize copper, so Kim was going pretty gentle on the zinc.
One fairly straightforward way to test whether hidden tissue copper is the issue or not is for Kim to take supplemental copper and see how she feels. Because her symptoms were so intense before the mineral balancing it was very difficult to test supps or to tell what was causing what. Now that her head is more clear, testing to see how she feels on small doses of copper on days she feels otherwise well is one way to get a sense for whether she is likely to have copper toxicity or not.
My guess is that Kim does not have copper toxicity and will not have an exacerbation of symtoms by taking copper. However it is well known that mercury scrambles copper metabolism, so even with sufficient levels of copper, her body may not be able to metabolize copper so long as there is still mercury present. The focus needs to continue to be on removing more mercury.
Kim’s health challenges are a prime example of the many ways that allopathic medicine can undermine a person’s health – and the cumulative, synergistic affect that dental amalgams and fillings, hormonal birth control, pharmaceuticals and vaccines can have on a person’s physiology.
Kim is an example of an exceptionally healthy person who feels unwell most of the time, thanks to mercury poisoning. She eats a nutritious organic diet, is in a nurturing and supportive relationship with her True Love, meditates and does yoga, and is emotionally and spiritually tuned in.
I am often amazed at the fortitude of my coaching clients to remain dedicated and optimistic in the face of very daunting odds. Drawing on her own internal power and with the help of minerals, Kim has been able to remove a huge amount of her toxic metal load and improve her overall mineral balance.
Since her retest, Kim has had her last mercury filling removed.
Stay tuned for an interview with Kim in our next installment!