Doctor Mackert
Dental amalgam has been proven safe and effective for years, yet unfounded controversy still surrounds it.
Dentists have used amalgam, an alloy of mercury with at least one other metal, in fillings for over 200 years. Amalgam fillings don’t contain enough mercury to cause potential health problems associated with larger doses, says Dr. Rod Mackert, professor of dental materials.
“The dose makes the poison,” he says, quoting 16th century Swiss physician Paracelsus. A person would need between 265 and 310 amalgam fillings before even slight symptoms of mercury toxicity could be felt. A person with seven fillings, which is average, absorbs only about one microgram of mercury daily. About six micrograms are absorbed daily from food, water and air, according to the Environmental Protection Agency…
Urban legends abound, including erroneous reports linking vapors from amalgam fillings to kidney damage and degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease. The only documented health effects of amalgam fillings are rare allergic reactions, Dr. Mackert says, but the controversy led many people to have their fillings removed in the misguided hope of curing neurological diseases.
That controversy continues today. “It’s mystifying that people persist in saying there is cause for concern with amalgam fillings when there’s no evidence that they cause adverse health effects,” Dr. Mackert says.
I have a few amalgam fillings in my noggin that are over a half-century old. No side effects other than a strange compulsion to smack people who refuse to read science upside the head.
Eideard 
I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1981. 3 hospitalizations, 8 different medications including oral and intravenous chemotherapy for MS, experimental Plasmaphoresis, bedridden for 10 years, slurred speech and dying. I had my 16 dental amalgam mercury “silver” fillings removed and guess what? All symptoms gradually disappeared, NO medication, NO relaspes, NO symptoms, except this left me in a wheelchair! I have since discovered I have a poor detox system and methylation system. Dr. Boyd Haley,former Professor Chair of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky and one of the leading toxicologists on the mercury issue. “Dr. Boyd Haley explained why people who have the APO E4 gene type are less able to detoxify mercury and thus are more suscetible to developing such neurodegenerative diseases at a younger age.” It has been proven “mercury” leaches from the dental amalgams 24/7 for the lifetime of the amalgam everytime a person chews, brushes their teeth, drinks hot liquids, etc. It’s your decision!
Linda Brocato
DAMS-IL
Sorry for your condition but RTFA. We’re still talking about the autoimmune system attacking the central nervous system. The gene expression you describe only covers predeliction – not cause and effect.
Anymore than does your personal understanding of a case history almost 3 decades long.
The article made it clear that “normal” absorption of mercury is six times greater than that derived from several fillings. So, your own case brought you up to what is “acceptable” by today’s standards.
I don’t doubt those standards are still too soft. I also don’t intend to spend my life hiding in a cocoon because of every individual case history extant.
I still feel safer guiding my daily health decisions on generalized research and advice from years of medical studies – rather than one person’s experience with an ailment.
[Edit: No flaming] Let’s see if you can read and draw the correct conclusions from the excerpt I’ve quoted from a prestigious neurology handbook.
Chapter: Clinical and neurochemical aspects of inorganic mercury intoxication. In: Investigations of the Nervous System. Vol. 64. DeWolfe FA ed. Handbook of Clinical Neurology. Vinken PJ, Bruyn GU eds. Elsevier/North Holland, Amsterdam pp. 367- 411
“The problem of susceptibility to mercury is essentially that doses of mercury harmless to most people produce a dramatic neurological disease in a few. Apparently the few had been healthy before exposure to mercury. Could they be susceptible because they had an otherwise harmless polymorphism which led to excessive mercury being retained, distributed to the brain, or unrestrained from damaging essential neurochemical reactions, or which led to critical reactions being unusually prone to inhibition by mercury? This is the situation in which people would be with the gene defect for Wilson’s disease if they had been raised in an environment entirely free of copper and if they were suddenly moved into ordinary surroundings. Health would quickly change into disease.
Vallee’s group raised the possibility that polymorphisms of metallothionein or a related protein could account for the susceptibility, but there was no direct support for this hypothesis. Neal et al. (1941) had pointed out that hatters ill with mercury toxicity often had much lower urinary mercury levels than their healthy workmates. The susceptibility might represent an inability to excrete the metal at an adequate rate. In modern terms, this may be due to a polymorphism.”
Clinicians who are helping people overcome mercury poisoning throughout America are finding exactly this, too — there are several natural polymorphisms that effectively make the mercury-poisoned among us a “genetic minority”. Your point of view is just at illegitimate as an Irish cop forcing his Chinese neighbors to share kegs of beer with him, when they lack the liver enzymes necessary to detox alchohol properly.
While you claim you have no side effects from amalgams, I would assert that your impaired ability to reason correctly on this issue is a sign of impaired intellectual functioning that could be attributed to mercury poisoning.
Have fun sticking neurotoxins in peoples’ head. There’s a special place in hell for clinicians like you.
You don’t realize your entire response is a logical non-sequitar.
Real science is not on your side in this issue, even if politics remains so because of the corrupt economic self-interests of dentists and amalgam manufacturers.
You haven’t answered me with your one-liner.
Health Canada’s critical scientific review of the neurological hazards posed by mercury amalgam fillings is a good piece of scientific research for you to become acquainted with: “A Monte Carlo Assessment of Mercury Exposure and Risks from Dental Amalgam”.
The “dose makes the poison” argument that reckless members of your trade like to gape in protest, like so many mindless, ogle-eyed guppies rythmically pumping water through their gills, is obliterated by the persistent minority of people who continue to be poisoned by mercury exposures that don’t seem to effect their neighbors.
And it’s not an allergy — it’s mercury poisoning, pure and simple. If you increase the dose, even for the majority who don’t get poisoned by a few fillings, then THEY will start getting the same symptoms, too.
What can’t you understand about this?
Are you really going to smugly assert that your profession owes no duty of due diligence to each of your patients to find out if they can properly detoxify a known heavy metal neurotoxin before permanently implanting it in their heads, where it will release a steady amount of vapor for years, in quantities documented to exceed both OSHA and ATSDR safety levels?
I eagerly await another one of your one-line responses attempting to weasle out of painful conscience-provoking thought on this issue.
Your only response is an article published 14 years ago? To refute a comprehensive computational analysis published in 2009?
Better stick with the Old Testament. Same level of peer review.
Cripes. This Post is drawing wingnuts like [edit: No flaming]
First do no harm…Since there are people who have mercury sensitivity (unless there is an equal or larger number of people sensitive to porcelain), then does that not require the responsible dentist to choose the method that is least likely to cause harm?
In my experience, that’s exactly what happens. In our litigious society, anything else would be foolish. Of course, it helps to be an informed patient and question your physician regardless of the treatment – if you have a concern.
I discovered my allergy to penicillin in a doctor’s office. Of course, this was back when it wasn’t common – or common knowledge. Fortunately, the reaction was severe but not deadly.
Nowadays, doctors ask about allergic reactions. Another place where a truly portable, fully accessible medical history would be useful.
dear god,
it is a beautiful thing for your to rely so heavily on science and the data discounting ‘anecdotal evidence’. i am a living, thriving, healthy anecdote buddy.
all i can say to you is wait until you or a family member you love is an anecdote… there are none so blind as those who refuse to see.
good luck with your head in the muck. you might just be giving off toxic waste.
Of course, on a daily basis, you rely on the products of science and engineering whether you’re capable of admitting it or not.
Whether it’s your car starting, your radio, TV and computer bringing you information through the ether, modern aseptic surgery, anaesthesia and medication providing you a much longer lifespan than your primitive forebears – you rely on the fruits of modern science time and again every day.
You might drop to your knees and thank some spooky angel every time something as simple as a washing machine works – or a mild antibiotic prevents an infection on your kid’s scraped knee; but, the products that pass the test of reproduction and verification are what save peoples’ lives. Not spooky beliefs.
Nor for that matter – cursing the devil in the dark.
Cripes, what sort of ignoramus prefers subjective apocrypha over methods proven over decades of testing and use?
Go see your friendly neighborhood witch doctor instead of a physician?
I suppose you’d have kids skip their vaccinations, cure malaria with a blue stone, prevent STD’s with prayer.
I’ve lived in communities where kids died of whooping cough, measles and scarlet fever – and lived crippled from polio.
Dude – get beyond the Stone Age!
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