I had the opportunity to watch a documentary covering research into the dangers of “silver” amalgam fillings while taking an Intro to Folk and Alternative Medicine class in college. The American Dental Association worked hard to bury the story believing it could cause widespread panic.
Personally, after seeing the BBC documentary I promised I’d pay extra for porcelain fillings in the future. (My dentist was not particularly happy I had seen the documentary.) Did you know there’s more mercury in silver amalgam fillngs than silver? (Let’s all applaud the nomeclature consultant who thought “silver amalgam” would yield more trust and acquiescence than “mercury amalgam.”)
Mercury slowly evaporates from the fillings, and some university researchers thought, hey, wouldn’t it be great to find out where it goes? So they gave some sheep and monkeys a mouth full of cavities. Within a year, traces of mercury could be found throughout the body.
Fritz Lorscheider and Murray Vimy set about clearing the smoke surrounding the amalgam mystery. Vimy, the academic dentist and World Health Organization consultant, and Lorscheider, Professor of Medical Physiology at the University of Calgary, pioneered a simple yet dramatic experiment to show not only where the missing mercury went but also that it did do harm when it got there. Their work shattered the comfortable illusion that mercury in amalgams was stable and safe. They took a sheep and put fillings in it’s teeth containing radioactive mercury which would show up as black on X-rays.
Dr MURRAY VIMY: Here’s the outline of the sheep, going all the way around, and this is the jawbone of the sheep. Here are the two stomachs. This area is the liver. And here are the two kidneys. And this is the transverse colon. So the mercury from the fillings, which was slightly radioactive, migrated to these tissues. In fact, it was in all the tissues. Now the dental profession said that well it’s a sheep, it chews too much, they grind a lot, they regurgitate their food, it’s not a good example.
VOICE OVER: So they repeated the work with monkeys and found again the mercury had spread. Furthermore, they discovered that even small amounts of mercury from amalgams damaged the kidneys of the sheep.
Read the full transcript of the BBC’s broadcast of The Poison in Your Mouth to see what kind of information the American Dental Association didn’t trust Americans to process rationally.
Or you can watch the documentary — don’t you just love the Internet.
[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2288515475015225824]
Over a decade later, the same tug of war over the safety of “silver” amalgam fillings continues at several days of FDA hearings in 2006 reviewing mercury toxicity as it pertains to dental work.
The continued use of mercury in dental fillings despite decades of evidence demonstrating its toxicity when used that way seems comparable to the decades of data supression by the tobacco industry that shows cigarettes to be highly addictive and a potential health risk or the current raging battle between mercury additives in vaccines and the growing links to autism.
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