why are mercury containing amalgam tooth fillings considered safe despite mercury being extremely toxic?
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I’m a dentist and I’ll try to give as concise an opinion as I can:
My cards on the table first. I’m not ‘Pro-amalgam’, I’m pro-evidence.
I hardly place amalgam fillings anymore, probably only about 6 in the last year. There are some of my colleagues who will have done more amalgams in half a day of work this morning than I have in 12 months.
The reason isn’t because I consider amalgam to be dangerous, but because I believe there are now better materials out there, combined with the fact that most people prefer aesthetic white fillings.
Some salient points:
Many studies on toxicity are on free mercury rather than bound mercury in amalgam, which is a different beast.
Blood and urine levels of measured mercury may not be helpful as a measurement at all.
Only a correlation to illnesses is meaningful. And over 50 years of serious research has not found any correlation between the two.
The greatest ingestion of mercury comes from fish (esp larger fish like tuna). And this is in the more toxic form of methylmercury, which easily crosses the blood-brain barrier and accumulates there , not being excreted and so doesn’t show up in urine analysis.
There’s a good environmental reason to reduce our usage of mercury amalgams but to claim that it is a danger to public health is unsupported, unscientific bollocks.
(Wait till you find out what’s in the ‘safer’ white fillings. It’s a cytotoxicity party mate).
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