When patients ask me if chelation therapy works and whether they should try it, my answers are always "no" and "don't try it." Patients in the U.S. already spend millions of out-of-pocket dollars a year for intravenous chelation therapy, even though there is no scientific evidence that chelation therapy improves anything but the pocketbooks of those delivering the therapy.
Chelation therapists have claimed that this form of treatment opens the narrowed arteries that supply blood to the heart and legs. No studies have substantiated this claim and the proponents of chelation treatments have carried out no valid trials to prove them.
By contrast, randomized, double-blind studies of intravenous chelation therapy with EDTA were carried out in 153 patients with claudication (leg pain with exercise due to narrowed leg arteries) in Denmark and in 32 patients in New Zealand. The small improvements in these patients after weeks of treatment were the same whether they received EDTA or a saline solution intravenously. A Canadian trial randomly assigned 84 patients with coronary heart disease to treatment with either intravenous EDTA or intravenous saline twice weekly for 15 weeks. After 27 weeks there was no difference between the two groups in how long they could walk on a treadmill before developing abnormalities on their electrocardiogram.
In the late 1990s, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission banned advertisements stating "that EDTA chelation therapy is an effective treatment for atherosclerosis, or about the effectiveness or comparative effectiveness of chelation therapy for treating or preventing any disease or condition related to the human circulatory system." Despite this ban on advertising these benefits of intravenous chelation therapy, the practice continues because it is not prohibited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And now many Web sites advocate oral chelation therapy for cardiovascular disease and many other health problems. No valid studies have shown that oral chelation provides any benefits for people with heart disease, and I think such benefits are highly unlikely.
I had thought that intravenous chelation was safe, even if it was ineffective. However, last week I read that a five-year-old boy from England went into cardiac arrest and died after undergoing chelation therapy for autism, a psychiatric disorder, at an Advanced Integrative Medicine Center near Pittsburgh.
