Understanding Toxicity Through Health Optimization Medicine

• How do chronic, low-level toxic exposures like mercury, arsenic, and aluminum quietly disrupt cellular energy and lead to widespread symptoms across multiple organ systems?
• Why does the current medical model often miss the root cause of illness by focusing on isolated organ systems rather than underlying cellular dysfunction?
• How can subtle, long-term toxic accumulation go undetected on standard tests while still impairing mitochondrial function and overall health?
• Why is metabolomic testing a critical tool for identifying early dysfunction before it progresses into damage and disease?
• What does it mean to shift from disease management to true health optimization at the level of metabolism and cellular resilience?

What We Discuss:

00:00 Intro: What’s Toxic to the Cell Affects Everything
00:50 Mercury Toxicity Case Study
02:20 How Specialists Miss the Root Cause
03:50 The Problem with Modern Illness Medicine
05:00 Emergency Medicine vs Root Cause Medicine
06:10 Arsenic Exposure from Everyday Products
07:15 Acute vs Chronic Toxic Exposure
08:10 Fish Consumption, Mercury & Hidden Risk
09:10 Why Toxicity Builds Before Symptoms
10:00 Why Blood Tests Often Miss Toxicity
10:50 Intracellular Testing Explained
11:50 Mitochondria & Energy Production Breakdown
12:50 Metabolomics & Detecting Hidden Toxicity
13:50 Disease Management vs Health Optimization
14:40 Final Takeaways: The Cell Is the Foundation

Full Transcript:

Dr. Scott: [00:00:00] Welcome back everybody to the Health Optimization Medicine podcast. We're your hosts, Dr. Yuval, Dr. Ted, Dr. Alan, and myself, Dr. Scott. Today, we're gonna talk about how what's toxic to the cell is toxic to every organ, and this is such an important piece for all of you listening. There's a foundation that everything lies on, and Dr.

Dr. Scott: Ted saw this in clinical practice very, very amazingly and terribly on-- with one of your patients. 

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Yes. I had a [00:01:00] patient, in his, late 60s, and, he suddenly collapsed, right? and was brought to the emergency room, and I was called. I was, here. I told them that that looks like an, acute exacerbation of a subclinical mercury poisoning because I have been monitoring his, mercury levels over the past few months.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: But, being a very, very important person, he had a lot of, s-specialists. So during the time, he manifested several things. He, he manifested, itchiness of the skin, right? Which is, of course, unknown to the dermatologist. Actually, not the dermatologist, but bo- didn't bother to, to measure it.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Doesn't know. Yes. And so there was the-- with that one specialty, that was, consulted, and then, he started having, premature ventricular c-contractions. And so had a [00:02:00] cardiologist, and the cardiologist, actually, at the endpoint, wanted to, recommended ablation. right? And then he had two neurologists, right?

Dr. Ted Achacoso: One for muscle weakness, and the other one is for, the electrical, the nerve conductivity, testing. So those are by two, neurologists. So you could see here, already an entire group of specialists. So the dermatologist was, just saying pruritus, right? the, cardiologist said, BPCs, blah, blah.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: The, ... neurologist, said, this is just, weakness from old age," and so on. And when he went to the emergency room, I actually sent all the testing data. I said, "This is, an acute exacerbation of, his subclinical, mercury." It was ignored, right?

Dr. Ted Achacoso: All the specialists were called. And then when-- What's nice is that some of the [00:03:00] specialists, especially the cardiologist, when I spoke to him,I said, this is gonna be all covered by mercury toxicity. Here is his levels." And, he actually said, "You know what? I take back my recommendation for an ablation and so on."

Dr. Ted Achacoso: He said, "Because all of these, signs and symptoms they're having are actually due to mercury toxicity," right? So at least there's one, shining light over there. And what I had to do was I actually had to take-- They ha-- And the toxicologist was called last and told me, I am the last person to be called in these kinds of cases.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: So, so it's actually quite interesting the kind of, medical care that we have right now. And Since the hospital had no experience in, actually detoxing a patient from, from mercury, I-- the patient had been taken home, and I had to actually create a protocol for, the, elimination of as much mercury as I could, right?

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Which took several sessions. But that [00:04:00] shows you how not monitoring for our, heavy metals, in our blood, they can accumulate there, right? and illness medicine will look at it from their own specialty lens, and they're not wrong with their diagnosis.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: It's just that they're wrong with the, etiology of the disease, right? So, but here you hit one, and you hit everything else, right? and that's the-- that is a sad story of, what we have right now in terms of heavy metal toxicity. 

Dr. Scott: And, Allen, you see this on a regular basis in the ER, right?

Dr. Scott: When somebody comes in with a syndrome or some symptoms, what do you typically do? 

Dr. Allen Bookatz: fortunately, in the ER, we're not really tasked with figuring out what's actually going on with them. It's just stabilize the airway, the breathing, the circulation, any, systems that are immediate threat, and then we hand it off to someone who's much smarter than us.

Dr. Allen Bookatz: and then Unfortunately, those people that we're handing it off to are specialists, and they look at it through their own lens, and they're trying to ask, "What can we do?" So it might be a cardiologist [00:05:00] saying, "The heart is having irritability. let's singe or burn off the pathways that are causing it to be more irritable."

Dr. Allen Bookatz: the kidneys might be failing, so let's put them on dialysis and replace that. Those aren't wrong, but I-- what-- I- from learning from Dr. Ted and, going through the health optimization modules, and the more I ch- change my frame of reference, when I do see a constellation of symptoms, yes, it's important we treat the organ that is being affected, that is at threat, but we can also sit back and go, "All right, what-- how did they get here in the first place?"

Dr. Allen Bookatz: So actually, a good example that, more on an acute, on an acute timeframe, we had this lady who came in, and she had itching of the skin. She had, strange rashes that were showing up. She had a, a waxing and waning cognition that was, 

Dr. Scott: Syphilis. 

Dr. Allen Bookatz: Syphilis. I know, right? Yeah. Syphilis, lupus, and everyone was trying to figure out what was going on.

Dr. Allen Bookatz: Was it a stroke? Was it a [00:06:00] bloodstream infection? everything was coming back normal. And it wasn't till we went back and said, "What,is there anything she's been taking?" And we found out that there's some imported, vitality tea that she was getting from China, over the last, like, six weeks, and she'd been drinking this tea, and that correlated perfectly.

Dr. Allen Bookatz: And we got a sample of it, we sent to toxicology, and we found out it had super high levels of arsenic in it. again, that is not something that we would typically be on our shortlist as we're looking at this. Sure. But again, it leads to w- something is blocking her energy production. Something is, is going straight into...

Dr. Allen Bookatz: Right? If it's affecting the cells, as we talked about, then it's... If, if it's not good for the cells, it's not good for the, the system as a whole, whether those are brain cells, kidney cells, heart cells. The-- what shows up is just, is g- is going to show up at that time based on what, what system has the least amount of resilience.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: You have a [00:07:00] wonderful dog. w- Wally, remember that news, that the dog chews from China were, coated with melamine? What did you do then? 

Dr. Allen Bookatz: Fortunately, Wally has a pure organic raw diet. California style ... he's, he's better than us. 

Dr. Jup Kuipers: I th- I think what's important here to realize is that in the story you just told, the consumption of the toxic was quite acute.

Dr. Jup Kuipers: But most- Often these subtle toxicities or deficiencies, they accumulate- 

Dr. Ted Achacoso: I forgot a background. Sorry. The patient was a pescatarian and ate only fish. 

Dr. Jup Kuipers: Mm. 

Dr. Ted Achacoso: And so that was a gradual accumulation of mercury, and the last intake was the one that pushed him over into an acute phase. So it was a chronic subclinical, toxicity, and then, at the last bite of that, Tuna

Dr. Ted Achacoso: tuna,[00:08:00] is, is the one that, actually put him over. 12. Mm. but the, the thing is, even if I already advise him to, to take off the fish from his diet, or he have the, have the smash,Smash 

Dr. Scott: fish, yes ... 

Dr. Ted Achacoso: yes, as fish, he still refused, right? So, so with that last bite, that was the one that induced him to collapse, right?

Dr. Ted Achacoso: The severe muscle weakness and so on. So that's the background of that, person. 

Dr. Jup Kuipers: Well, that feeds exactly into the point I was making- Mm ... that these toxicities accumulate over maybe a decade already- ... and you don't have to start optimizing your health or- ... correcting these deficiencies and subtle toxicities when symptoms arise, but you can already do it years before and measure these metabolites that aren't traditionally seen as, like, a clinical toxicity, but are slowly damaging all your cells with all these downstreams effects on all these different organ systems.

Dr. Allen Bookatz: I love what you just said, Jup, 'cause we wait for there to be this acute [00:09:00] clinical presentation- Mm ... of, their neurologic system is failing, their heart's failing, kidney's failing, and it's obvious. But, and in, in that case that I shared, it is o- it was obvious, but for most of us that are just trying to take care of ourselves, to eat healthy 'cause we're told, "Hey, fish has high levels of omega-3s, so let's go get as much salmon and sushi as possible," bigeye tuna, swordfish, yellowtail, whatever it is,I love sushi, and it's ha- made me rethink some of my own health choices here.

Dr. Allen Bookatz: but these, you're right, we eat them, and they get these, these very, very low doses of heavy metals get depot into our fat, and they get stored. And, it isn't... and if you were to take a blood mercury test, it might not even show up as positive. you might find that it's in a very, it's, it's not in any concerning level.

Dr. Allen Bookatz: Mm. And so an illness medicine doctor, a toxicology report wouldn't necessarily show acute mercury toxicity. So this is again the difference between when we look at a [00:10:00] disease state, which is what we look at in illness medicine, versus looking at health. When we back up and say, what could be blocking our energy production?

Dr. Allen Bookatz: Mm. On the metabolomics test, this is routinely done. We look at the urine, and we- have very, very rest- very, very, low thresholds to detect heavy metals, and anything that might even be a little elevated, you're gonna pick up because the body is subtly excreting those 

Dr. Ted Achacoso: For the crucial ones like mercury, lead, arsenic, et cetera, those are intracellularly tested, meaning they actually lyse, the, the cells to actually release them during testing.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: So we know that, for example, the toxins that you're carrying in your blood are just being transported, but what is really accumulating in your cell is intracellularly tested. So that's a newer technique that just, arose, few years ago, where you're actually testing it by destroying the cells, sample cells and releasing their, toxic content.

Dr. Scott: Yeah. I think to kind of bring it all home here, right? When, when you're looking [00:11:00] at something like mercury, lead, arsenic, aluminum, et cetera, this is all having a detrimental effect on the basic cell, right? The cell's capacity to make energy. These are really cool diagrams. They're all spaghetti-looking, as Ted likes to say.

Dr. Scott: But in essence, your citric acid cycle, which is the cycle that helps flip off electrons from our food, every single step along the way, it's what it... Can I sell sex for money, officer? Is it? that's an acronym or a mnemonic, actually, mnemonic for it. but every single step along the way, if you have mercury, if you have arsenic, if you have lead, it's gonna stop working.

Dr. Scott: So why do people feel so bad is that their mitochondria start getting annihilated in the capacity to make energy. So everything else on top of that starts breaking down, your immune system, your heart, your liver, all those organs that we're talking about, right? But in the end, it's all that basic cell.

Dr. Scott: And so that's what we do when we look at metabolomic testing. We're looking at that basic cell and understanding that it's not basic. It's just the foundation to everything that there is. And so if you look [00:12:00] at that level, you're looking at mercury, you're looking at lead, cadmium, arsenic. I had a patient with interstitial cystitis, for 10 years, and then they stopped having aluminum deodorant, and it went away, right?

Dr. Scott: And so aluminum toxicity, all these things can do it, right? This is all sort of foundations on the cellular side. And so metabolomics is what we use as a foundational way of looking at the cell in real time, and doesn't take the place of going to the ER if you need to or, going to your family medicine doctor or whatever, but it's the foundation of everything.

Dr. Scott: That's why I'd say it's not mutually exclusive to anything you're doing already. It's just the foundation of everything that we think that you can do now and have real actionable data. Anything else? 

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Yeah. We'd like to go back to Aubrey de Grey's model, metabolism, damage pathology. Pathology started disease.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: Damage is what they are doing now with all these new things like exosomes and replacement, stem cell replacement therapy, et cetera. And then now that metabolomics is available, we can [00:13:00] actually act on the metabolism itself, and that's where health optimization medicine lies, right? is to optimize that so that you slow down the progression into damage.

Dr. Ted Achacoso: If that's not possible, even... And this is not possible a decade ago, right? So. 

Dr. Jup Kuipers: Your s- your quote hits well on that. You always say, "Just because you're not sick doesn't mean you're healthy, it just means you're not sick." Yeah. And our current healthcare system is very good at managing disease, but what we're missing is- Optimization

Dr. Jup Kuipers: the specialty that optimizes health. A patient should have a disease management plan for when they get sick, and they should have a health manage- health optimization plan for always, actually, and that's what a complete healthcare system should look like, right? Yeah. 

Dr. Ted Achacoso: What do you say? Disease is managed, health is optimized, right?

Dr. Scott: Well said. As always, Tim. The one-liners, you always got them. Thank you everybody for listening to another episode of the Health Optimization Medicine podcast. We'll see you next time.

Find more from Health Optimization Medicine and Practice (HOMeHOPe):

Website: https://homehope.org/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/homehopeorg/
HOMeHOPe Conference 2026: https://homehope.org/homehope-conference-2026

Use PODCAST10 to get 10% OFF your purchase of the Clinical Metabolomics Module at https://homehope.org/products/clinical-metabolomics

Find more from Troscriptions:

Website: https://troscriptions.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/troscriptions/

Use POD10 to get 10% OFF your Troscriptions purchase at https://troscriptions.com/collections/our-products