EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH GARRY GORDON, MD, DO
Announcing a New Organization for Longevity Medicine

The "father" of the modern chelation movement, and one of the cofounders of ACAM, is Garry F. Gordon, MD, DO. A world-renowned expert on chelation therapy, nutrition, mineral metabolism, and alternative and preventive therapies, Dr. Gordon wrote the original protocol for the safe and effective use of EDTA. He has published many scientific papers and is coauthor of the best-selling book, The Chelation Answer. In this exclusive interview, Dr. Gordon explains his rationale for the creation of a new encompassing organization for longevity medicine, the International College of Advanced Longevity Medicine (ICALM) . We are excited to present information of what we believe to be the first formal announcement of ICALM's existence.

WILL:Tell us about your new organization.

GARRY: The newly formed International College of Advanced Longevity Medicine (ICALM) is an organization whose primary concern is education and training in the field of longevity medicine. Membership is open to all physicians and allied health professionals who choose to devote their energies and practices to achieving the maximum extension of useful lifespan for their patients. What makes ICALM unique is our goal of achieving true synergy by incorporating every school of medical thought, and effectively sharing that information to achieve the goal of maximum extension of useful lifespan while optimizing how to achieve improved quality of life, and not just quantity. Many forms of traditional medicine have long recognized biological individuality, and have based their therapeutic approach on these differences. Biochemical individuality is now documented scientifically by the human genome project which is demonstrating just how unique each of us is.

WILL: How does your thinking evolved?

GARRY: Back in the 1960s, it had become abundantly clear that in the past the allopathic model left much to be desired. Because my clients included MD's, DO's, Naturopaths, PhD's, nutritionists, and chiropractors that were involved in nutrition, I began to appreciate the variety of alternative medical practices available. Watching some of the extraordinary work these practitioners were doing led me to new conclusions, which I then taught at conferences around the world.

My attitudes and beliefs came to embrace homeopathy, acupuncture, bioelectrical medicine, magnetic healing, etc. I reached a point where I could no longer comfortably teach my colleagues in the organization I had helped to found back in 1973 - The American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM). At that time, my fellow physicians were skeptical about acupuncture and herbal medicine, and it was difficult for me. So, for many years, I simply attended meetings and neither lectured nor taught anywhere. The more I accepted alternative medical practices such as body/mind medicine, oxidative and environmental medicine, the more difficult it became to have meaningful dialogue with my colleagues, who hadn't received the same extensive, international training.

WILL: What about the more academic work of Drs. Denham Harman and Johan Bjorksten? When did you pick up on what they were doing?

GARRY: From the late '70s, Dr. Bjorksen and I were colleagues who shared similar views. He spoke at ACAM conferences many times, and he personally took a lot of chelation treatments. I went on to read all his books and to use his research in my practice. Regarding Denham Harman, I didn't get involved with him in the beginning. In fact, when I wrote my book, The Chelation Answer, I didn't include free radical theory as one of the mechanisms to explain chelation's beneficial effects.

WILL: What about the the more radical longevists, the immortalists?

GARRY: I understand their position. I probably have more books on antiaging, longevity, even immortality, than anybody's ever seen, for which I've created a bibliography with extended comments, including books on these subjects from Europe and Canada. Over the years I've gotten to meet a lot of the authors and gotten to know their work directly.

WILL: What about the 1980s? What were you doing then?

GARRY: I resumed active medical practice in Sacramento in 1985, taking over my old practice which I continued to run until 1992. During that time we expanded from about 4,000 square feet to my newly designed center of 17,000 square feet, which included a health food store, a restaurant, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, a treadmill, and an acupuncture department - in short, anything you want to name. We had 60 employees and we did it all without insurance reimbursement.

Back then, alternative medicine had even more opposition than it has today. In fact, California law criminalizes many of our therapeutic approaches. In the '70s I treated two of the leaders of the California State Senate. Because they benefited from our care, they helped introduce a law exempting nutritional advice from penalties under the Medical Practice Act. Until we did that, you could go to jail for telling people to take vitamin C for colds, which is exactly what happened to a health food store owner in Sacramento.

WILL: When was that?

GARRY: That would have been in the early '70s. After getting that nutrition exemption law through, I kept trying to change the laws preventing alternative cancer treatment in California. Although we had been successful in creating the health food store exemption, we have never been able to change the laws in California allowing doctors to prescribe vitamins or anything other than chemotherapy, surgery, or radiation in the treatment of cancer. The penalty is jail!

The political action group representing California physicians (Cal Pac) became powerful, and they have effectively blocked any further reform in the medical practice act. So my colleagues attempting to offer alternative medicine to California patients, are continuously harassed and many of them have lost their license to practice. This is why I'm now in Arizona.

Since my therapies and tests are not considered usual, reasonable, or customary by insurance companies, all of my patients wind up paying out of their own pocket for any and all of my services. This means that none of my patients come to see me regarding minor problems. I have an unusual practice specializing in serious diseases including ALS, MS, advanced cancers, gangrene, and so forth.

I've had a lot of cancer patients, and the truth is that I'm not God. So when I didn't succeed in curing every patient, I became vulnerable to litigation for potentially dissatisfied family members. Although I beat the medical society in court quietly at an appellate conference, my legal harassment continued. I also beat the medical board in an appellate settlement conference where I got everything I asked for after having lost at the lower court level. Nonetheless, the State of California Board of Medical Quality Assurance made it clear to me that if just one patient ever signed a complaint, whatever it cost them, they would see to it that I was stopped by getting my license pulled.

ORAL CHELATION ABSORPTION WILL: What can we tell our readers to reassure them that the oral form of EDTA is well absorbed? GARRY: Bruce Halstead, MD, wrote a book called The Scientific Basis of EDTA Chelation Therapy. His book is endorsed by the American College for the Advancement of Medicine (ACAM). In fact, it was just updated with a couple hundred new references, and was sold for the first time at the recent ACAM conference. It costs $70 and has lots of fancy colored plates inside. In it, Halstead states that EDTA is 4-18% absorbed. Bullseye! This scientific book was published in cooperation with ACAM, Great Lakes Association of Clinical Medicine, the American Board of Chelation Therapy, and the International Board of Chelation Therapy. From this moment on, anybody inquiring about chelation should be referred to this book. WILL: So ACAM is committed to this now. - GARRY: Yes. There's no place they can go after backing this book. WILL: While it's better to take oral EDTA between meals on an empty stomach, it's still OK to take with meals. A lot of people are already taking supplements four times a day with meals and at bedtime. If there is a need to take EDTA at yet other times, that is a big burden. GARRY: I have never made the timing of oral consumption a big thing. Frankly, the data show that taking EDTA orally is effective. It is just less effective than the IV route, but more convenient to do so.

WILL: So, let's just go into the future. Where do you see the real advances coming in? What are to be the technologies of tomorrow? With general acceptance of the free radical theory of aging and antioxidant nutrients and so on, where do you think we're going? What about genetics? Where do you think the big future is for medicine?

GARRY: Well, those are broad questions. It's hard to say what the prototype antiaging clinic will be, or what's going to happen. But our ability to stop the aging process itself is going to happen, and I believe it will happen soon. This is precisely why it's important to stay healthy now. Only by achieving optimal health will you be ready when that breakthrough comes.

WILL: Basically then, the idea is to just stay the limit, push yourself out there, and incrementally keep moving toward better and better health. What do you think will be the nature of the breakthrough?

GARRY: It's not really clear to me. I've recently attended a couple of the high-level meetings like the one put on by the Managed Health Care Association in Seattle earlier this year. I don't know which scientific theory of aging is going to win the race, but I am convinced that this race is going to be won. In the meanwhile, it seems clear that we need to bring together the consortium of people who understand the various disciplines by forming and encouraging truly educational organizations like ICALM. Only then can we be assured that we can get the mind straightened out, the diet optimized, the body detoxified, and health restored.

I'm convinced that when the breakthrough does come, those who have learned these basic things are going to get three times the bang for their buck. The rest are unlikely to fare as well. Where is medicine going? Some corporations are rewarding their employees/patients and their doctors by giving them incentives to choose alternate but effective therapies like chelation instead of big expensive surgical approaches. These corporations are promoting health optimization, thereby creating sharper employees, higher productivity, less downtime, fewer accidents, and less sickness. I'm already seeing this at many levels.

WILL: All to the good. What are the most important things you'd want people to understand about your organization, and why they should be involved with it?

GARRY: One of my goals is to get the brightest people from a large array of disciplines into the same room, where scientists and health-care professionals won't be afraid to share their problems and ideas. I believe that science is developing so rapidly, that very soon we'll be able to give a solid scientific explanation for why all these alternative medical concepts work so well whether you talk body/mind or whether you talk homeopathy.

WILL: Recently I read that the Institute for Scientific Investigation in Philadelphia found through their citation analysis that the most cited research during the 1990s is cell-to-cell communication. Isn't this figuratively what your organization is up to - improving communication among the different disciplines, the different specialties that comprise longevity land?

GARRY: Yes. However, it shouldn't be unique to want to educate or to train people in the field of longevity medicine. Yet for some reason it's not happening. Moreover, there should be nothing unique about an organization open to credentialing all health professionals, whatever their persuasion. But until now this hasn't happened.

ICALM recognizes these educational needs and was created to offer a platform from which credentialing is not a matter of politics but a matter of principle. What I really want to see is the effective sharing of information. Now what does that mean? In a Mayo Clinic environment, if five doctors from different disciplines all consult on one patient, they're all in separate cubicles. It is rare that those five doctors will ever sit down together and say, "How would you approach Mrs. Smith's problem?" The bottom line is that wherever you go today, in alternative or allopathic medicine, there is no effective sharing of the information. The allopathic doctor never bothers to read what the homeopath, the environmental doctor, or the body-mind specialist said about dealing with Mrs. Smith's lump or bump or problem.

What we're trying to do with ICALM from the beginning - which I didn't do with ACAM, the last organization I helped to found - is to attract only people who are hungry to go beyond their narrow field of expertise. Ideally, ICALM members will be health professionals who are not affected with the kind of myopia that prevents their acceptance of healing not explained by the paradigm championed by their professional training.

The trouble with many professional organizations is that - although they may be blessed by people who have excellent credentials and/or may even be part of a major mainstream entity like the National Institute on Aging - they're bureaucratic and therefore ineffective. ICALM will differ in that it will offer timely information and emphasizes useful education.

WILL: So you're trying to make this organization a home for a variety of different professionals, who share a thirst for knowledge and answers, and are not merely operating in the ether.

GARRY: Exactly. In addition, ICALM will do the education and IBALM (International Board of Advanced Longevity Medicine) will perform the testing for health professionals who want to achieve advanced standing in longevity medicine. It will be up to IBALM to determine what percentage of candidates will pass the written exam and what the requirements to take the exam will be. Initially, a candidate for the written examination will have to attend three separate two-day workshops. Currently, ICALM offers two of those, the longevity workshop and the advanced longevity workshop. The chelation workshop requirement may be satisfied by attending the ACAM or Great Lakes Association of Clinical Medicine chelation workshops.

WILL: Isn't it inevitable that with the exponential expansion of knowledge in anti-aging, the requirements for recognition in this field will increase over time?

GARRY: Of course! Beyond that, I foresee a day in the not-too-distant future when the old medical subspecialties like cardiology and dermatology no longer serve their purposes, and will have evolved into new subspecialties within the aegis of antiaging medicine. In fact, I believe that most medical specialties, whether they are recognized as "legitimate" by the AMA, will find an exciting new home within ICALM/IBALM. We know that many who are joining ICALM already have multidisciplinary training, and they create synergy by bringing their skills to bear on the eclectic field of longevity medicine.

WILL: Who will be on your board of directors?

GARRY: Currently the board includes Arthur Balin, MD, PhD, Jonathan Wright, MD, Ward Dean, MD, Leo Galland, MD, Julian Whitaker, MD, Serafina Corsello, MD, and Robert C. Atkins, MD.

WILL: This is great. I'm really optimistic about this venture, and I'm glad somebody's doing what you're doing. Moreover, you seem to be the perfect person for it. You're broad-based, your ideas are exciting, and you're clearly knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the field.