This weekend I tabled at a local event to keep spreading the word on biochar.  A woman came up and was simply gushing about biochar so I asked her why she was so enthusiastic. Most people that have ever heard about it in my neck of the woods are either gardeners or farmers, but that was not the case here.  She told me that she’d been suffering from mercury poisoning for a long time, had tried many different treatments to no avail.  Finally a holistic medical practitioner asked if she’d be willing to try biochar as a detox option.  Having been told there were few possible side effects she was more than willing to give it a go.  The prescription was to take small doses for 3 days, then wait 3 weeks and take another round for 3 days.  Blood work was conducted before and after and the biochar proved to work amazingly well.  She was happy and finally healthy.

Feeling a bit incredulous that a local medical practitioner in the Finger Lakes would know about biochar, I asked if she meant activated carbon or actually biochar.  She said, yes, it was definitely biochar.   Knowing that biochar is still uncommon in the Finger Lakes, I asked her where she bought it.  She told me the name of a local woman that I had sold a small amount of biochar to last year who wanted to test it on a few dairy cows that were not fairing too well.  Although I was hesitant to sell her char for this purpose as I’d not tested my chars on cows, eventually I provided her with a char that I felt would be safe and have relevant properties for that type of use. I’m pretty sure that is the char that ended up cleaning up the mercury for the woman that told me the story.  Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought of selling it to someone for human consumption without further testing – to date its mostly been tested for filtration purposes and has done quite well.  Turns out however, it was highly successful at sorbing mercury and a pretty cheap cure at that – at least in this scenario.  I am still smiling after hearing this story.  More investigation is surely necessary, but in a pinch I’d have to say I would definitely take this particular kind of biochar (made from grape seed extract which is a bit hard to come by unless you happen to know someone making grape seed oil!) to detox.