Apart from excess copper in a few conditions such as Wilson’s disease, Intrahepatic Cholangiocarcinoma, or a genetic disease called Menke’s syndrome, copper is a forgotten mineral and seldom discussed as a deficiency in functional medicine. Before reading this book by Morley Robbins who cleverly used the chemical symbol Cu for copper, I was unfamiliar with the importance of this vital mineral, its role in the mitochondria, and its ability to control the oxidative effects of iron in our body.

Morley Robbins is a retired hospital administrator who wanted to be a physician as a young man. When he retired, an encounter with a Chiropractor who helped his frozen shoulder fostered a curiosity about why people get sick and spurred Robbins to dig into research articles for three or more hours every day for ten years. The result was finding research over the past one hundred years that developed into what he calls The Root Cause Protocol. Simply put, his focus in the book was to explain how the important balance of three minerals: magnesium, copper, iron, and ceruloplasmin (a protein) relate to most chronic degenerative diseases. For this newsletter, I will focus on fatigue and the effects of these four pieces have on the mitochondria.