Filling a need for mercury-amalgam facts - Letters to the Editor

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients,  July, 2002  

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Editor:

Dentistry has perpetrated an uncontrolled multi-generational mercury experiment on the American people. Mercury-amalgam dental fillings have never been subjected to the kind of regulatory scrutiny and approval process demanded of all modern drugs and medical devices to prove safety. Only in the last few years have controlled experiments with animals been conducted by non-dentists in an attempt to estimate what we humans have already been experiencing over the past 150+ years of mercury-amalgam.

The American Dental Association's (ADA) origin derives from the controversy of using mercury for tooth fillings. Before mercury-amalgam became the standard of dental practice, only the rich could afford gold fillings--the rest of us went to the barber for tooth extraction. Mercury-amalgam enabled dentists to place many more much lower costing tooth fillings per day. This efficiency produced an ever-widening number of people who could afford professional dental services.

The division that killed the original dental association and formed today's ADA was between those who were concerned for the public's health from the poisonous mercury release, and those who had dollar signs in their eyes. (1) Money won.

Until this day dentistry has used marketing, political influence, and control of regulatory boards at all levels to impose its self-serving economic view that mercury-amalgam is completely safe. The science that proves safety is still not forthcoming from the ADA, nor from dental schools, nor from mercury-amalgam manufacturers.

Marketing has long been dentistry's first line of defense for its use of mercury. The true nature of mercury-amalgam has been disguised with the soothing label "silver filling." Efforts to gain the public's trust and confidence have imposed high psychological barriers. For many people conditioned to trusting, it is too unbelievable, too egregious to even consider the possibility that their dentist has been poisoning them with mercury.

Science has not been the driving force behind the ADA's public information on mercury release. When asked about the safety of mercury-amalgam the response one always heard previously, and can still hear today in many dental offices is: "once set, the mercury becomes completely stable and locked up, it doesn't leak out."

After it was unequivocally demonstrated that mercury vapor continuously escapes from mercury-amalgam fillings, the ADA repositioned itself and now claims: "the small amount of mercury released from amalgam restorations, especially during placement and removal, has not been shown to cause any adverse health effects." (2)

This last position statement made in 1997 is the one we are living under today, adopted by the dentists at the ADA, FDI World Dental Federation, and the World Health Organization in a consensus agreement. This position is at odds with what scientists independent of the dental industry have been learning by studying amalgam mercury exposure and uptake in humans and animals.

Mercury escapes from amalgam and is taken up by the human as metallic vapor, metallic vapor and ionic mercury dissolved in saliva, and as unknown mercury species directly through the tooth pulp and root into the bloodstream. (3) Ionic mercury in saliva is converted to methylmercury. (4)

The more competent human studies on exposure have looked at the amount of mercury vapor in an individual's mouth, mercury in their saliva, mercury in their urine and feces, and compared that to individuals who have never had any mercury-amalgam fillings. There is an extreme range of dental mercury exposure and uptake from person to person. The high end of the range reaches 100 micrograms of mercury uptake per day in a single individual. That any individuals can be found with such high daily mercury exposure and uptake from their mercury-amalgam dental fillings is cause for alarm. (5-8)

Animal experiments with amalgam produce further cause for alarm. There are genetically determined susceptibilities to mercury-caused systemic illness. Some animal strains are highly sensitive with quite noticeable trace mineral disturbances and immune system activation after mercury-amalgams are placed into their teeth. Other strains are highly resistant with only small pathological changes observed in response to mercury-amalgam. (9)

In genetically susceptible animals mercury concentrations in the same range as received from mercury-amalgams have been found to cause autoimmune disease, inhibiting and disturbing immune system functions. (10-14)

Mercury concentrations as received from mercury-amalgam are toxic to human brain cells forming neurofibrillar tangles, amyloid placques and causing tau phosphorylation in susceptible tissue cultures. (15-17) These three phenomena are the primary diagnostic characteristics a pathologist looks for in a deceased person's brain to confirm a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

Mercury travels from amalgam fillings into the jaw, gut, liver, kidneys, glands and brain, crosses the placenta to the fetus, and is found in mother's milk. (18-22)