Imagine this. Mercury, one of the most toxic substances in the earth, leaking daily in your mouth and into your central nervous system.
Not a good scenario, right?
Well, if you are one of the million people who has one or more amalgam fillings, chances are, you are ingesting mercury right now as we speak.
According to some studies, there is evidence that mercury continually leaches from amalgam fillings at a rate of about 10-50 times the safe limit (0.28 microgram/day) set by the US Public Health Service.
As a dental patient, you should know that Amalgam contains mercury; and mercury toxicity has been linked to birth defects, multiple sclerosis, fatigue, Alzheimer’s disease, Autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, reduced immune function, antibiotic resistance, and impaired kidney function. It is also a potent killer of white blood cells and that proper removal of amalgam fillings will restore white blood cell counts to healthy levels. There is also evidence that the number of T-cells (an important part of immune defenses) decreases substantially when amalgam fillings are placed in the mouth, but increases again once the fillings are removed.
So how does the mercury leak into your body?
Many studies have found that chewing releases the mercury from your amalgam fillings. The mercury vapors released easily end up in the pituitary glands in your brain. Autopsies performed in the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found out that cadavers who have amalgam fillings has 3 times more mercury in the brain and 9 times more in the kidneys compared to cadavers without amalgam fillings (We ingest and inhale mercury everyday from the foods we eat and from the polluted air we breathe).
The common bacteria found in our mouth and intestines convert mercury into methylmercury, a compound that is 100x more toxic than the elemental mercury. Methylmercury easily passes the blood-brain barrier as well as the placental barriers. Therefore, several governments around the world prohibit dentists from placing amalgam fillings on pregnant women.
Mercury is also linked to heart diseases, trigeminal neuralgia, psychiatric symptoms (and in very low concentrations) like depression and irritability; chronic fatigue, kidney damage and hearing loss.
There’s no doubt in our mind that amalgam fillings pose serious threat to our health whether we show symptoms of mercury toxicity or not. Therefore, our dental clinic in Makati maintains a “Mercury-free” practice.
Now, if you are a health card holder, you are entitled to free amalgam fillings according to the amount you pay the health card company. Amalgam fillings are very cheap and easy to place in teeth. But as an educated patient knowing the hazards of having amalgam fillings, would you choose convenience over your health?
For your health’s sake, have those old amalgam fillings replaced now.
Here’s an interesting fact, though: the American Dental Association maintains that amalgam fillings are safe; contrary to the declaration of the EPA or the Environmental Protection Agency that amalgam is considered a hazardous material! However, when the ADA was faced with a lawsuit regarding the use of amalgam fillings, it was quick to file a defensive statement: “The ADA owes no legal duty of care to protect the public from allegedly dangerous products used by dentists.”
I still have to read a journal regarding the stand of the Philippine Dental Association on the use of amalgam fillings. I reckon that we still don’t have a unified stand on this as proven by the different health card companies ‘requiring’ dentists to use amalgam fillings for their client’s teeth instead of the tooth-colored composite resins.