The first time I saw mercury outside of a thermometer was in a tutorial of dental materials in the dental school, in 1965, as we were being introduced to Amalgam. The tutor then said to us, "Make sure you do not touch mercury with your bare hands as it is very poisonous." I asked him then, "if it is so poisonous, why are we using it, and why are we putting it in people's teeth?" He laughed at me with the rest of the class, as he told me that once mercury is mixed with the amalgam alloy it is locked there and a new compound is formed. I believed him. I had to, for he was the tutor and I was the student. He must be right, I thought to myself.
Like my colleagues, I used amalgam extensively. For it is easy to use, cheap, and just about the most suitable thing for a back tooth at that time. In the early 70's a new material was introduced, a white filling with many limitations called Adaptic, and I felt that I must use that instead of the ugly looking amalgam, on which one of my patients commented, as she looked in the mirror, "Oh, it looks worse than decay. "
I worked for some time in the NHS, and, like many, I was obliged to use amalgam for all but the ones who opted for the better-looking white fillings. When I was asked by one of my then NHS patients if there was any truth in that amalgam is harmful to one's health, I said that I could not see how it could be, since it is permitted by our most diligent controlling authorities, and that I saw nobody with problems resulting from amalgam. I told her that had amalgam been a health hazard, we would have seen it, since it is implanted in the mouths of almost all adults in the western world.
On suffering from some mild toothache, I asked a very good colleague of mine to have a look at my teeth. He enthusiastically looked, got his needle out, stuck it in me, and started drilling. I still remember that feeling as I walked on my way to my car. It was as if I was hit by one of those huge balls that they use to demolish buildings, only I did not recall the moment of impact. I thought it must have been the anaesthetic that made me feel like that.
A few years later, I started having problems with my digestive system. I started having abdominal cramps, belches that smelled of rotten eggs, severe diarrhoea, and a total loss of energy for the period up until I manage to empty my bowels. I saw many doctors, who would examine me, then pronounce me OK. No diagnosis and no treatment. A year and a half later, after I decided to take matters into my own hands and find out for myself what was wrong with me, I found out that it was wheat that was doing this to me, and to a lesser extent, cow's milk products. When I avoided these, I had no attacks of that kind.
My health, however, started to deteriorate. I started to suffer frequent colds, flu, sore throat, headaches, disturbed sleep, mood swings, and a creeping loss of energy. Thinking, which is my favourite past time, was becoming more and more difficult, as if there was heavy fog in my brain. Like almost all amalgam sufferers, I failed to make the connection.
By the 80's, I threw away my dentomat, and used only white fillings. I started to look again at the question of mercury. Could it be true that amalgam is a health hazard?
 I read about it, and was shocked by what I read. Amalgam is not at all the stable compound we once thought it was. It loses its mercury all the time, in many forms, and where would it all go but mostly down into my body. If mercury is the highly toxic substance they say it is, then, despite all the denials, both I and many of my patients are being slowly poisoned.
Remember Asbestos! Remember lead, remember thalidomide, and remember DDT! There were similar denials then as there is now about mercury.
Let us now look together at amalgam. Not just mercury, but amalgam.
We know that dissimilar metals create a galvanic current. With a few amalgams around you have a whole battery in your head. Do we want that? The assault on the human body is not just by the mercury, but also by the silver and copper that the amalgam contains. When I remove all of the amalgams for my patients they report immediate relief, especially of their headaches. Why is that? I suggest it is mainly because of the removal of that battery that is bombarding their brains with such currents. That is in addition to the fixing of the leaky mercury tap, bringing it below a reaction threshold for some.
I would like to share with you some of my case histories.
I can tell you about the MS patients who could hardly walk down my corridor, and who can now run down it.
I can tell you about the pianist whom I thought, when I looked at her the first time, that she was going to die on me, and who was completely transformed into a new being after amalgam removal. She wrote me a letter saying that, for the first time since a very long time, she was able to "connect" to her music.
I can tell you of the lady who had her amalgam removed somewhere but felt no better, so she was sent to me. When I examined her I found a speck of amalgam still there by the side of one white filling. I told her that I did not think that that speck would have caused her symptoms, but I will remove it anyway. A week after the removal of this tiny mercury speck her husband came with her and asked me, what did you do to my wife! Her depression has gone, and she is now back to the woman I married 30 years ago.
I can tell you of the person who had traveled the world looking for a cure from his continuous headaches. He had every conceivable test, x-ray, scan... you name it he had it. When he heard me speak about amalgam on TV, he thought, I tried everything, so let me try this one. I removed his amalgam with immediate cessation of his headaches.
I can tell you of the middle-aged lady who considered committing suicide because of her symptoms as life seemed to her not worth living anymore!
The fact is that not one of my patients, but most of them, find their way to me as a station of last resort. None had failed to benefit in his or her health from the removal of amalgam. They all share the same experience, they all went to their doctors with particular complaints and were told, before or after examinations and tests etc., that there was nothing wrong with them, that they needed psychiatric treatment that they were, more or less, imagining their symptoms!
I have another group of patients, whom you might call the controls. Those are the patients who had no complaints, or rather were not aware of any. All of them benefited from amalgam removal. One of them wrote to me, saying "the windows were dirty, but I did not know. "
These are not cases of magic; they are cases of cause and effect. I am really baffled that there are some, in fact there are many, who still think today that amalgam is safe!
No one can argue that mercury is not one of the most poisonous substances on earth. No one could argue, as I am prepared to show you, that amalgam leaks its mercury out into the patient's saliva and his oral environment. In fact if you spend your day spitting your saliva down the toilet, with its dissolved mercury content, you would be breaking the law, but if you swallow it as you usually do, you won't be!
There are a lot of people around who say that that is just fine, and you are not getting any harm from it. I can tell you that that is not the case.
There are agencies, such as the EPA, WHO and others, that put an arbitrary figure of limits on mercury;
EPA: 2 parts per billion in drinking water .
FDA: 1 part per million of methyl mercury in seafood. Methyl mercury is more than l00 times more toxic than elemental or inorganic mercury.
OSHA, the occupational safety and health Administration, sets limits to 0.1 milligram of organic mercury per cubic meter of workplace air, and .05 mg/cubic meter of metallic mercury vapour for an 8 hour shift and 40 hour work weeks.
In some patient's mouths, the actual readings can be 20-40 times that much!
METALLIC MERCURY is used in industry to produce chlorine gas, caustic soda, in thermometers, in batteries, fluorescent tubes, etc.
Metallic mercury evaporates very readily, giving off a colourless odourless gas. When inhaled it is toxic to the lungs, can be lethal in high doses, and from the lungs it is carried to the blood where it combines with erythrocytes, and is eventually transformed into inorganic mercury forms or organic mercury. Short-term exposure to a high level of mercury vapour can cause lung damage, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, hypertension, tachycardia, skin rashes, and eye irritation. It can also cause a significant increase in mortality from stomach and lung cancer, as is the case with the Tuscany fur hat workers.
We can detect mercury vapour very easily with a mercury vapour analyser, a piece of equipment that I believe no dentist should be without.
It takes 4 seconds for mercury vapour to get into the circulation, and its half- life in the body tissues is about 80 days.
INORGANIC MERCURY comes from the reaction of mercury with other elements such as oxygen, chlorine or sulphur .It is water soluble, and therefore dissolves in saliva and is swallowed causing damage to the GIT, and the kidneys.
Inorganic mercury is used in many creams such as antiseptic creams, ointments, skin-lightening creams, and more notoriously, some vaccines. Mercuric chloride is now considered by the EPA as a possible human carcinogen, together with methylmercury.
ORGANIC MERCURY is formed when elemental mercury goes through a micro-organism. It is the way the bacteria protects itself from its mercury load. I had, it seems, some of these bacteria in my guts, and they had a supply of mercury coming at them. They then use the reducible sulphur in such foods as wheat and whey to produce hydrogen sulphide as natural protection or natural chelators against mercury , as H2S is a potent Hg chelator, pulling mercury out of anything. However, H2S itself is very toxic, and is 5 times higher in the faeces of ulcerative colitis sufferers, causing severe inflammation and impairs colon energy metabolism (by preventing butyrate oxidation and impairing respiration chain cytochrome C oxidase). Detoxing H2S happens through methylation, thus producing along the way methylmercury, which is absorbed, and finds its way quickly to the brain and the CNS, impairing its function in a variety of ways such as memory problems, sleep disturbance, anxiety, depression, moodiness, irritability, tremors, lack of concentration, tiredness, headaches, fine tremors. Boyd Haley has shown that the changes in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease, such as its effects on nucleotide binding, are identical to the effect of mercury on brain tissues.
Another way the GIT protects itself is by encouraging the multiplication of the yeast candida albicans, as it blots out a lot of the mercury. This is not without a heavy price nevertheless.
There are other effects of mercury in all of its forms on almost all of the tissues of the body, causing fatigue, what is now known as ME is probably mercury poisoning, muscle weakness, excessive perspiration, salivation, and urination.
Another well documented damage is what happens to the person's immunity: resulting in all the autoimmune diseases that we know will get better when mercury is removed. I can now tell you about the erosive lichen planus that disappears after removal of mercury. Much oral ulceration disappears after mercury removal. Sore throat improves, sinusitis improves.
How to deal with Mercury
I advise a total ban on amalgam. It may be true that it affects some more than others, depending on their constitution and genetic predisposition, but based on my findings, mercury affects every one who is exposed to it.
REMOVAL OF AMALGAM: Instructions for the Dentist
The important thing to remember is to make sure as much as possible that what you are removing goes nowhere other than into your suction.
Wear protective clothing and mercury vapour mask.
Isolate the patient and ensure he swallows or inhales none of what you are removing. I found that rubber dam is not the best way to isolate, as it encourages vapour and particles to bounce on it in something like a trampoline effect, and amalgam powdered products can seep underneath the rubber dam and be swallowed unnoticed by the dentist. I use instead an assortment of sponges and cotton wool rolls that will absorb what hits them rather than let it bounce in every body's face.
Uses an oxygen line for the patient.
Concentrate fully on keeping suction as close to the bur as practicable.
Use a metal cutting bur, such as 2158 carbide bur.
Use mercury vapour analyser to read the mercury vapour before removal, then read it after removal. You will find that Amalgam removal is not the same as mercury decontamination. Chase vapour wherever you may find it till you achieve total decontamination.
Use HEPPA air filters and constantly monitor the air quality .
Use amalgam separators.
Before beginning to drill, have the patient tested on the Safety Protocol see if they are at risk from an adverse reaction to the drilling, to any dental materials and to determine the safe order of drilling
So. Mercury is out of the patient's mouth, then what?
This is an area that I believe needs a lot of attention, as we must ask the question, we remove mercury, then where is it going? Will it come back to us in the shellfish or the fish that we eat? Will it be back in the air we breathe?
Conclusion
I feel that mercury has damaged the quality of life for many. Dentists are prime sufferers here, although not fully aware of it. Dentists and patients must be protected from mercury and its hazards. We can live better without mercury. Our lives do not depend on it. Dentists' livelihoods, however, do depend on mercury in the main. It is for economic reasons, not health reasons, that mercury is still being used today. The onus is therefore on the Government to ban the use of mercury, and not just for pregnant mothers and their foetuses or breast fed babies, who incidentally are draining the mercury out of the mother and into themselves with horrible consequences for young innocent lives.
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