Amalgam fillings - really bad or not that bad?

All I can do with this is to give a counter example. My wife works for a Dentist. At times, people have come to him to have their mercury fillings removed and replaced. Even though doing so would line his pockets, he tells them that is unnecessary, and that he would advise against it.

 

The only studies on such a topic would be epidemiological, which by their nature, are not controlled well. The best you can do is hope to find age-matched people who never had any fillings at the time when mercury fillings were used and see if they differ in any health problems from those with mercury fillings. The problem is that if you never needed a filling in that time, it could be an indicator that your overall general health was better too, either through better preventative care or the luck of the genetic draw.

Likewise, with biological studies of any kind, and especially with epidemiological studies, the results are not always clear-cut. It's hard to sort out other risk factors, and you have to deal with individual variation. It's much easier to create a vacuum and drop a ball and measure the time it takes to drop with no other variables affecting it than it is to measure something in a population of people who have the freedom to live their life in their manner of choosing. This means that when you get results that are not clear-cut, there conclusions drawn from them can be much more open to interpretation. Usually, one tries to look at a question from multiple directions and in multiple populations before a sufficient body of evidence exists to start drawing stronger conclusions based on common patterns in all the studies rather than the results of just a single study.

 

It is not advised to handle mercury with bare skin. Why would it be ok to have mercury as a permanent resident in your mouth?

If its in your teeth, you are in contact with it. This doesn't take a 2 million dollar study to figure out whether or not its good or bad for you.

For a list of symtoms see:

The Poisoning of Minamata (Japan)

http://www1.umn.edu/ships/ethics/minamata.htm [Broken]

 

There are serious scientific studies on this subject. Here are three I found
just in Apr 2006 issue of JAMA (Journal of the Americal Medical Association)

Here are some more references you check out, they were given
in the following article:

 

In dental amalgam, the mercury is incorporated as part of the compound material, and is not as freely available as if you were just handling pure mercury with your bare hands.

From:http://www.ada.org/prof/resources/positions/statements/amalgam.asp [Broken]

Quackwatch has a good explanation too. http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/mercury.html

 

In his schooldays (1960s), my dad had ended up with a mouthful of mercury when mouthpipetting it in the lab (safety standards were terrible in those days). No apparent ill effects. He has an IQ over 170.

 

Sorry, apparently I put the wrong link with "see list of symtoms". But, Minamata is a fairly obtuse symtom.

Here's a better description:

From:http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,1607,7-153-10370_12150_12220-26953--,00.html

And here is an article perfectly suited to this thread from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Please read this and critique if you have the time!

http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/295/15/1784

I realize that the mercury in compound fillings is part of the compound and not "pure mercury". It is however, 50% of the amalgam... along with silver and small portions of other metals.

This amalgamation and the process of amalgamation does not change the toxicity of mercury... it only bonds it to some other elements like silver. Upon "gassing off" in the mouth, the mercury remains a toxic threat and a risk to overall health.

Although mercury/silver amalgam is the most cost effective and one of the most maliable yet strong materials discovered (in the 1700s by the Chinese) to fill a cavity........ these arguments resemble the sort of argument that the Romans might have used to justify transporting their drinking water through lead piping. And we know the rest of that story. koo:surprised koo
Thanks!

 

IQ of over 170!!!... this is quite possibly a symtom of mercury-induced neurological hyperactivity!

Unless your dad was mouthpipetting mercury everyday he does not make a good subject of study with regard to the effects of amalgamated mercury residing in a person's oral cavity 24/7.

Don't get me wrong. I believe the old "what don't kill ya, don't kill ya..." type of reasoning. You know... like how you need a bit of arsnic every week to live through a full dose if it happens... and so on.

 

Hmmmm déjà vu :uhh: ........ (my last post - 1st ref.)

 

No, I know it's just an anecdotal one-off thing. Just throwing it in there, since it seemed half-way relevant.

 

Oops. I thought things felt duplicated today!... my apologies Ouabache.

I certainly can't argue with the JAMA party paper since they have done the study and I haven't. I'll have to bow to the research and personally avoid toxic poisons like mercury and floride on my own. There are other poisons I'd rather expose myself to at any rate.

 

Your first statement is not necessarily true. If we are defining toxicity in terms of what deleterious effects the mercury will have to the exposed organisms, one major factor in this is bioavailability. In other words, in its current state how much of the toxicant in question is absorbed and interacting with the system. In this case, since it is bound in the amalgam, it has little chance to accumulate to toxic levels and elicit damage. Another example of this would be if I gave a person a capsule containg a lethal dose of cyanide that was coated in a material that could not be digested by the gi tract. Obviously the cyanide is still toxic, but it will not harm the person because it was not available.

Another interesting aspect of this was brought up by the Minamata incident you mentioned. This was a tragic event the occurred in Japan when numerous people died or were seriously affected following the consumption of shellfish from the waters surrounding their home harbor. The mercury was dumped into the harbor by industrial processes and ended up in the sediments. This mercury in its metal ion state is indeed toxic, but not particularly so. In the sediments it was methylated by certain bacteria, which made it much more soluble and available for accumulation by shellfish and other animals. Once these were ingested the more toxic methyl mercury exacted its toll on the people. Very unfortunate situation, but again stressing that not all poisons are created equal. Perhaps if the people had only been exposed to the industrial waste mercury, things wouldn't have been so bad (pure speculation).

 

I see what you are pointing out. That's fantastic information! So where I say the toxicity doesn't change in an amalgam you say the exposure to that toxicity is measurabley less than were it fully exposed as methyl mercury.

I suppose my inclination is that if you have mercury in your mouth... you have mercury in your mouth and mercury is a class (x) toxin (effects will vary from person to person). If there is a viable alternative to having mercury in your mouth it sounds as though it would be a reasonably better choice than having a highly toxic metal firmly embedded in one's skull.

I know the dental physicians who support this technique do so out of concern for the general populice. However, where one hand of the dentist offers the composite filling as an alternative... the other hand is defending the amalgam program. I guess that's marketing.