A Critique of Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (HTMA)

A Comprehensive Critique of Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (HTMA)

Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (HTMA) is a controversial diagnostic method that claims to assess mineral levels and imbalances in the body by analyzing a sample of a person’s hair. While proponents argue for its usefulness in detecting nutritional deficiencies and heavy metal toxicity, HTMA faces significant criticism from the scientific and medical communities. This article summarizes the key issues surrounding HTMA, incorporating multiple critical perspectives.

Fundamental Problems with HTMA:

1. Poor Repeatability

Studies have shown that multiple samples from the same person, analyzed by the same lab, can yield significantly different results.

The very bedrock of science is an experiment that gives consistently repeatable results.

This lack of repeatability undermines the entire basis of HTMA as a reliable diagnostic tool.
Without consistent results, it’s impossible to draw meaningful conclusions from the test.

This argument is so strong, there is almost no need for any further points. However, the tests from the same person from the same lab are not entirely different, they are significantly different, which can lead to conflicting and differing advice, even from the same consultant.

2. Lack of Scientific Validity

HTMA fails to meet basic scientific standards, particularly in terms of reliability and repeatability.

There is a lack of standardization across different laboratories, leading to even greater inconsistent results. Different labs use both different tools and techniques to analyze hair, and they use different reference ranges, creating additional levels of confusion and lack of repeatability.

The scientific consensus generally does not support HTMA as a reliable diagnostic tool for most health conditions or nutritional status.

3. Contamination Issues

Hair can be affected by external factors, potentially skewing results:

Shampoos may contain zinc, (because zinc is the active ingredient in shampoos for dandruff) which the hair can absorb.

Tap water used for washing hair may contain various minerals of different levels around the nation (calcium, magnesium, sodium, iron, copper, or more) that can alter hair mineral content.

These contamination sources make it nearly impossible to determine whether measured mineral levels reflect internal body status or external contamination.

4. Inconsistent Interpretation

HTMA consultants often disagree on how to interpret test results.

There’s no consensus on fundamental aspects, such as whether high calcium in hair indicates high calcium in the body, even if there wasn’t a water contamination problem.

This lack of agreement on basic principles undermines the reliability of any conclusions drawn from HTMA.

5. No Correlation with Body Tissue Mineral Status

Studies have shown poor correlations between hair mineral content and levels in other body tissues or fluids.

The HTMA industry has not conducted, nor presented, any comprehensive studies correlating hair mineral levels with cellular levels, likely because they know that they do not correlate. If they undermined their own diagnostic tool, would anyone use it? Not likely.

Different tissues in the body concentrate minerals differently (e.g., calcium in bones, copper in the liver, iodine in the thyroid, and zinc is not concentrated anywhere specifically), further complicating the interpretation of hair mineral levels.

6. Incomplete Mineral and Nutrient Testing

Most HTMA tests do not include analysis for crucial elements:

• Fluoride, despite its potential impact on health
• Vitamin A levels
• Other potentially important minerals, nutrients, or toxins may also be omitted. There are hundreds of toxins in the environment and in humans, and they often only test for about 10 toxins.

1. (7) Limitations in Interpretation Expertise

Obtaining an HTMA test and interpretation does not guarantee that the interpreter:

• Accurately understands which minerals are beneficial and necessary for the human body
• Knows which minerals might be harmful as supplements
• Can determine appropriate dosages for mineral supplementation

1. (8) Flawed Assumptions About Mineral Accumulation

HTMA tests often operate on the false premise that minerals can “build up” in the body and become toxic or excessive. This assumption doesn’t hold true for many minerals: Magnesium, potassium, copper, boron, and iodine are typically excreted quickly and easily. Sodium, while less efficiently excreted than potassium, can still be eliminated relatively easily by healthy individuals, even at levels up to 5 grams intake per day. Even excess calcium can be easily excreted in the presence of sufficient magnesium.

Flawed assumptions about mineral accumulation could lead to unnecessary or potentially harmful interventions, such as advising against beneficial minerals due to unfounded toxicity concerns.

9. False negatives

Tests can suffer both from false positives and false negatives. A false negative is when a test tests for mercury, which is nearly universally acknowledged as toxic, and the test does not detect any mercury in the hair. It is acknowledged among HTMA professionals that such false negatives for mercury can exist in a hair test, because the mercury might be stuck in the body, and not coming out in the hair, or not being excreted in any way. This creates at least two problems. First, a person might wrongly conclude that they are not toxic with mercury. Second, the existence of this false negative indicates that hair is not a proxy, or indicator for minerals in the body, undermining the entire basis for the tests.

Also, the other implication is that regardless of what the test says, we should just assume we are toxic with mercury. And if that is the case, then there is no reason for a hair test.

Furthermore, not only do the hair tests not test for fluoride at all, but fluoride is nearly a universal problem in the United States. The average person has 2600 mg of fluoride in the body, and 99% of that is trapped in the bones. So it’s not going to be in the hair anyway, even if they did test for it.

10. Causes and Solutions

Even if a HTMA test could test for a mineral imbalance, there is no way that a hair test could determine how the imbalance was created in the first place, and no way to know how to correct for that imbalance.

• A hair test does not list the prescription medicines a person is taking nor their side effects.
• A hair test does not describe the dietary patterns, nor can it suggest dietary changes.
• Even if there was a correlation between calcium in the hair and calcium in the body, a hair test would not show whether calcium is concentrated in the bones or the soft tissues. Nor would a hair test list the 22 factors that can improve or worsen bone mineral density. https://revealingfraud.com/2023/05/health/how-to-increase-bone-mineral-density/

11. Correlations cannot be used to prove Causation

HTMA advocates not only ignore the scientific methods repeatedly as mentioned, but suffer from flawed logical thinking and application as well.

I researched this deeply, and I found a long “refutation” of the claims that HTMA is not valid, by an HTMA advocate, located here: https://nutritionalbalancing.org/center/htma/science/articles/htma-references.php

Most of the claims are that certain hair patterns correlate with diseased conditions.

They forgot the basic logic axiom, correlations are not proof of causation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

Anyone who took a basic philosophy course, or statistics course in college knows this.

A key reason why correlations do not imply causation with regard to minerals is copper. Blood tests for copper often come back high when copper deficiency, disease, or tissue damage exists. Copper cannot be a cause of infectious diseases, because copper kills germs. So, copper is being mobilized by the body to fight off germs in those cases. For more on this, see here: https://revealingfraud.com/2022/10/health/copper-is-not-toxic-and-blood-tests-prove-nothing/

So blood tests for copper are not reliable, and HTMA tests are far less reliable for many different reasons.

So most HTMA interpreters think that copper is toxic. They fail to understand, or even care about, the many enzymes that contain copper and need copper to work, and they fail to understand what those enzymes do in the body. And they don’t care, as that’s not a part of their “work”.

12. Multiple failures of logic and morality

The advocates of HTMA that I have met have never been able to engage in any meaningful logical discussions. They often resort to slander, in which case I have to block them, or they simply block me. This is extraordinarily unprofessional conduct and behavior. In fact, the slander is illegal, as well as immoral. It is unreasonable to seek out these kinds of people for advice.

People seeking health advice should carefully consider the kinds of people who would decide to go into the field of HTMA analysis, given its many flaws, as covered in this article. Even if they only halfway know what they are doing, they undoubtedly know of at least half of these scientific problems, but persist anyway.

Additional Concerns:

1. Potential Bias Among Proponents

Some HTMA proponents may have financial interests in promoting the test, selling their consulting services, and/or selling their own line of supplements and treatments.

Confirmation bias may lead practitioners to interpret results in ways that confirm their preexisting beliefs.

2. Invalid testimonials

A practitioner may offer general advice that works in general, and thus lead to real testimonials. But this does not validate the expensive, unnecessary, unscientific, and invalid hair test.

Scientific Method Concerns

The failure to establish both consistency of results, and basic correlations between hair and cellular mineral levels represents a fundamental gap in the scientific foundation of HTMA.

HTMA proponents have skipped crucial steps in the scientific process, moving to application and interpretation without first validating any of their core assumptions.

Conclusion:

HTMA is rightly controversial, because test results are inconsistent and unrepeatable and significantly different from the same person from the same lab, not scientifically valid, not standardized across labs, with differing and incomplete reference ranges, with valid and unfixable contamination issues, inconsistencies among and between interpreters, lack of correlation to body mineral tissue status, omissions of testing for other vital nutrients and toxins, limitations of the knowledge of the interpreters, flawed assumptions about mineral accumulations and minerals in general, and bias among both the testing industry and the consultant and interpreters, false negatives, failures to understand causes and solutions, poor logic and false reliance on correlations, poor understanding of copper, and poor interpersonal and lack of professional conduct all conclusively show that HTMA should not be relied upon for medical or nutritional decision-making.

Solutions:

Many other valid tests can help to determine which minerals to supplement, and here are a few examples:

1. There are full body cremation tests where they burn dead bodies and do a full spectrum analysis, to determine the average mineral content of the average person. These results are shocking and are reported here: https://revealingfraud.com/2022/03/health/chapter-35-mineral-composition-of-the-human-body/

In sum, most people’s bodies contain toxic levels of fluoride, bromine and lead, and contain very little copper, boron, and iodine.

2. There are double-blind, placebo-controlled intervention studies that show what minerals do, at varying amounts, when administered to people. These kinds of intervention studies can demonstrate causation, or what happens, when certain minerals are supplemented, or provided in deficiency levels. For example, providing copper at 0.58 mg causes copper deficiency. And providing copper at 20 mg, causes no harm. https://revealingfraud.com/2022/02/health/the-copper-revolution-ch-10-copper-at-10-mg-to-20-mg-does-not-harm-the-liver-olivares/
3. There are studies on enzymes, and studies of what those enzymes do in the body, and studies of what minerals those enzymes need to function. These enzymes do things that correspond and support and corroborate the intervention studies. For example, copper supplements help to give people more energy as shown by intervention studies. It does this because copper acts as an essential cofactor in cytochrome c oxidase (COX), an enzyme which is needed in the final stage of oxidative respiration and ATP creation in the mitochondria. In other words, if a person needs to breathe oxygen, and all people do, then they need copper. See more here: https://revealingfraud.com/2022/11/health/copper-the-ultimate-mitochondrial-nutrient/
4. Other studies show what amounts of vitamins and minerals are in the general food supply. They consistently show that the food supply has lost 90 to 100% of the copper that it contained in the 1940s, and thus, people typically get 0.6 mg of copper or less from food in America. https://revealingfraud.com/2022/01/health/the-copper-revolution-ch-3-dc-nutrition-article-summary/

5. We suggest that everyone take well-proven and safe vitamin and mineral supplements in levels far below maximum tolerated doses, in a comprehensive well designed and well-balanced protocol, designed to properly detox the body of all toxins, and designed to provide the key minerals not contained in the food supply:

We actually take about 20 Vitamins and Minerals.
https://revealingfraud.com/2022/06/health/minerals-and-vitamins-im-actually-taking/

We specifically avoid 30 other supplements.
https://revealingfraud.com/2022/09/health/supplements-to-avoid/

The Copper Revolution Protocol:
https://revealingfraud.com/2024/06/health/the-copper-revolution-protocol-june-2024/

For your further research:

Commercial Hair Analysis
Science or Scam?
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/400244

“Abstract
Hair samples from two healthy teenagers were sent under assumed names to 13 commercial laboratories performing multimineral hair analysis. The reported levels of most minerals varied considerably between identical samples sent to the same laboratory and from laboratory to laboratory. The laboratories also disagreed about what was “normal” or “usual” for many of the minerals. Most reports contained computerized interpretations that were voluminous, bizarre, and potentially frightening to patients. Six laboratories recommended food supplements, but the types and amounts varied widely from report to report and from laboratory to laboratory. Literature from most of the laboratories suggested that their reports were useful in managing a wide variety of diseases and supposed nutrient imbalances. However, commercial use of hair analysis in this manner is unscientific, economically wasteful, and probably illegal.”

Hair analysis–a critical review.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1346144/

Abstract
The analysis of hair for trace elements… has not yet been proven to be reliable or to reflect the status of trace elements elsewhere in the body. As well, little is known about the normal ranges of concentrations of elements in the hair or about the physiologic and pharmacologic factors that affect the concentrations. Until these problems have been resolved satisfactorily the diagnostic use of hair analysis performed by commercial laboratories cannot be justified in clinical practice.

Hair Analysis Panel Discussion: Section:
Appendix C, Sharon Seidel
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/HAC/hair_analysis/appendix_c_sharon.html

“Specific recommendations:

Do not use hair analysis for individual nutritional assessment. The state of the science does not support this application.”

The Uncertainty of Hair Analysis for Trace Metals
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/193418

“In 1985, an article by Barrett1 published in THE JOURNAL addressed several issues related to the use of trace metal hair analysis for assessing nutritional status. Now, in this issue of THE JOURNAL, Seidel and colleagues2 show that many of same concerns raised 15 years ago by Barrett’s study remain unresolved. Both studies used a self-prepared split sample that was sent to several laboratories specializing in trace metal analysis of human hair. Both noted the divergence of results obtained and the health-related claims made. Seidel et al also commented on the current regulatory environment that hair analysis laboratories now face.”

Assessment of hair mineral analysis commercially offered in Germany
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11878749/

Abstract
To evaluate intra- and inter-laboratory agreement concerning hair mineral analysis and interpretation of results, hair samples from 2 volunteers were sent to seven laboratories, which commercially offer hair mineral analysis in Germany. 6 weeks later, another identical part from the hair sample of volunteer 1 was sent to all seven labs. Altogether, 50 elements were analyzed, 23 by all seven labs. For comparability, only the results for these 23 elements were assessed. The intra-laboratory reproducibility was evaluated by the 2 identical hair samples from volunteer 1. On the average, the reproducibility seems to be sufficient (median +/- 9.48% to +/- 20.59%), but for individual elements there were unacceptable out-rulers up to 100%. Only one lab classified all elements of the first and the second analysis of the identical hair sample in the same category (below, within, or above normal range). The others grouped 4 to 7 elements different. This is not tolerable. The inter-laboratory comparability was assessed by the results of the hair samples of both volunteers. For the sample of volunteer 1 at least the results of 6 (out of 23) elements were within an acceptable range of +/- 30% from the consensus value (= mean of all seven labs). For volunteer 2 this was only the case for 2 (!) elements. Differences of more than 100% were found for most other elements. Moreover, in the vast majority of the tested elements there was no comparability of the cLassification to the respective reference ranges of the different laboratories. For example, for volunteer 1 only 3 elements (our of 23!) were identically classified by all seven labs. As neither the analytical results nor the classification to the individual reference ranges by the laboratories correspond in tolerable borders, conclusions, drawn from these results, cannot be valid. Hair mineral analysis from these laboratories is unreliable. Therefore we must recommend to refrain from using such analysis to assess individual nutritional status or suspected environmental exposure.