It does not always do so, damage may be too severe and irreversible. But it offers a chance for a very safe form of intervention which can often take the person involved to the stage where surgery and increased medication become unnecessary and where effective long-term preventive methods, including exercise and dietary strategies, can be introduced.

Is chelation natural?
Given the nature of the damage which has already taken place in such conditions, of the dangers which apply and of the emergency status existing in many such cases, it is as natural an option as is likely to be found, and is certainly the safest.

What does medicine have to offer?
Many of the problems listed above relate specifically to obstruction, to the impeding of the flow of blood, often caused directly by the presence of concretions in the lining of major arteries.

Drugs can certainly help, but frequently at the cost of severe side-effects, and none address the causes of the problem, thus leaving the likelihood of the development of further disasters. Certainly there are now a host of drugs of varying degrees of effectiveness, all of which have major side-effects and some of which, while reducing the risks of the patient dying from the particular circulatory problem, actually increase the risks of their dying from other causes (see EDTA: how it works and what it does).

Surgery?
Bypass and other interventions may be possible. These methods (see EDTA: how it works and what it does) help some but not all, and most are risky in themselves or have major drawbacks and few can do anything for brain function if this is the area of the body most affected.

Without question modern surgeons have evolved amazingly skilful techniques, including the following:

• Balloons are carefully threaded into an appropriate artery before being inflated in order to compress the concretions, thus making more space through which the blood can flow.
• Alternatively, instead of a balloon, a minute laser might be threaded along the artery to the place where there are concretions so that these can be 'blasted and burned' away.
• By means of the similar insertion of a minute, high-power drill or cutting instruments, the obstruction is partially chiselled or cut away.
• There is perhaps the choice of the grafting of veins from other regions of the body, or use of those donated by animals or manufactured from special plastics, by which means the circulatory obstruction may be bypassed.

It is against the considerable known risks and variable and often very short-lived benefits - and of the limited success rate - which most of these methods offer, that we should measure the 'naturalness' or otherwise of a series of gentle infusions into the bloodstream of a synthetic amino acid, EDTA (ethylene-diamine-tetra-acetic acid).

This was initially thought to 'lock on' to the calcium cementing material which binds these concretions together and, by removing it from the scene, to allow the absorption of the rest of the material in the concretion (cholesterol, etc.). This somewhat simplistic picture of what happens has since been replaced by more recent research (described in Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5), which explains a scientifically more acceptable concept of just how the improvements seen in chelation therapy actually do take place. It was originally thought that as well as leaching out calcium from atheromatous deposits, chelation therapy removed ionic calcium from cells in which it should not be present, thus reducing the chances of local arterial muscle spasms, increasing the free flow of tissue-enhancing, nutritive-rich blood. These benefits are certainly often apparent after chelation therapy, even if the precise mechanisms are not as simple as those which pioneer chelation therapists imagined.