WHAT IS A HAIR MINERAL ANALYSIS?
Technically, hair mineral analysis is a mineral biopsy type of test. A biopsy is an analysis of a body tissue. This one detects the levels of 20 or more minerals in the hair. Hair is a soft tissue of the body, so one can say that HTMA is a soft tissue mineral biopsy that uses hair as the sampling tissue. Hair is extremely useful for testing many things besides minerals. These include drugs, toxic chemicals and even DNA. These, however, are not the focus of this article. At times I have heard people say that hair is not helpful for testing the body, when in fact the very opposite is the truth. WHY USE HAIR FOR ANALYSIS? Hair makes an excellent biopsy material for many reasons. Sampling is simple and non-invasive, and hair is a stable biopsy material. It requires no special handling and will remain viable for years. In addition, mineral levels in the hair are about ten times that of blood, making them easy to detect and measure accurately in the hair. Mineral levels are kept relatively c
