Well Water: Safe or Unsafe?
People are very proud of their well water. When you hear someone say, "we're on well water", the pride and maybe slight pity for people on city water is evident in their facial expression and the lack of need to say more. I almost never hear people go on about their water--about test results, about the way it tastes. Just simply "We're on well water," with a smile, as if that answers all my questions about their health.
Over the years, I have asked people to test their well water because they were having unanswerable health problems. The tests revealed elevated levels of arsenic, sulphur, iron, aluminum, copper, and lead. These can all lead to health problems. Arsenic can cause eczema and cancer, sulphur can cause skin irritation and rectal itching, iron can accumulate in the liver causing multiple deleterious effects including liver failure, aluminum is associated with Alzheimers and other neurological issues, copper causes neurological issues and displaces zinc, lead can cause low IQ in children, other neurodevelopmental problems, stunted growth, fatigue and brain fog.
One patient came to me with many neurological symptoms and exhaustion. Although her diagnoses were many, one of them was lyme disease. They live on acreage and she sees ticks around all the time. She went to a lyme specialist for 3 years with little positive effect on her symptoms. She returned to our clinic to deal with other diagnoses, as the lyme treatments had been exhausted. During the three years she had been gone, she had been experiencing serious brain fog and muscle contractions which almost seemed seizure like at night in bed. Her arms would contract up and her hands would go into fists while her legs had charley horses and her face contorted into twitches and grimaces. When she came back to me, I asked her to get her well water checked. She didn't want to because she thought the well water had not changed since they had it tested 4 years prior. I asked her to send me the old results but advised on getting new ones.
The results astounded me. The well was contaminated with three metals. Aluminum and lead were in the elevated range and copper was above the EPA critical amount. There was even a warning with an exclamation point on the test result showing that the copper level was unacceptable for human consumption. Yet she had been drinking this water the entire four years since the test and for many years before that! The only time she had felt better during her lyme treatment was when she moved to Seattle to do 3 months of hyperbaric oxygen treatments. Obviously, she was not drinking her well water during this time. Copper toxicity causes brain fog, muscle cramps, facial twitches and grimaces and seizure like contractions of the upper limbs specifically with the thumbs contracted in and hands clenched in a fist. Clearly lyme disease was not the only source of her neurological problems.
Even if you do not use chemicals on your land, the heavy metals could be in your aquifer from a prior resident, nearby manufacturing plant, or a close neighboring farm.
Here is how contaminants get into your well water. The above picture is only showing a few sources of contamination on the average farm. Bacteria and pharmaceuticals can come from septic, bacteria from livestock, diesel fuel used to leak lead but now still can leak sulphur into the water table. Because of environmental laws, lead was removed in 1995. Diesel fuel still has elevated sulphur which new laws have been enacted to reduce.
In addition, fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides can make it in to the water table and therefore the private well. Copper is used as a fungicide on many crops including grains, apples, peaches, blueberries, raspberries and many others. It also reduces algae formation, so it is used directly on standing water sources such as ponds. However, household water copper contamination usually comes from deteriorating copper pipes. Any home that has copper piping throughout can have copper contamination in the water, especially if the pH of the water is acidic (below pH of 7). In fact, this patient's water was very acidic at 5.4 pH. The water test had that noted as well. I do not know where the water was drawn from for the water test. If it was drawn from the indoor taps, the copper could be coming from pipes. If it was drawn directly from the well, then the patient's copper consumption can be much higher than the well water test suggests, if they have copper piping.
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