Should I Remove my Amalgam? How Do I Choose a Doctor and Dentist? How Many Fillings Do I Remove at One Time? Marie Flowers Update July 2009 This is July 28, 2009 and we are awaiting an announcement from the FDA concerning the classification of amalgam fillings. You may have read the announcement and wonder if you should remove your fillings. First of all, contact DAMS, Dental Amalgam Mercury Solutions at 651-644-4572 for an information packet on mercury removal and a list of safe biological dentists that will remove fillings safely. The website for DAMS is http://www.Amalgam.org. You can not trust all the lists of biological dentists on websites because not all of the so called biological dentists are following the safety protocols recommended by their holistic dental associations. Read, get yourself educated. And remember the spin from the ADA and the media may downplay the significance of the dangers of amalgam fillings. The American Dental Association will protest as they go down! Now read what I wrote about removing fillings in previous years. November 2006 If your dentist wants to replace some amalgam because it is old and cracked, you could become ill if you allow him to do it. Will he use precautions while removing it? Not if he is a regular dentist, or even a mercury-free dentist. Now is the time to seek a biological/ holistic dentist who will protect you from mercury vapor and will be more knowledgeable about replacing the amalgam with a safer material. Your regular dentist might take out the amalgam and put back more amalgam! If a filling needs to be replaced in your lower left side, a biological dentist could redo all the amalgam fillings on the lower left side at the same time if not too many need replacing. Dr. Hal Huggins recommends seeing a medical doctor first. See a medical ACAM doctor who understands mercury toxicity (www.acam.org or 1-800-LEADOUT) and he will give you supplements (multivitamin/minerals) to build up your immune system before the dentist starts removing the mercury. He will also give you mercury removing supplements (such as high doses of Kyrolic garlic, vitamin C, and some like Dr. Mercola recommend chlorella) to take so you will be prepared for your dental revision. This will reduce you chances of being further poisoned or becoming poisoned. Other doctors who treat mercury toxic patients include doctors from The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (www.aaem.com). Another organization I just heard about from Dr. Rebecca Painter, an ACAM physician who testified at recent FDA hearings on dental amalgam, is The American Board of the Clinical Metal Toxicology (www.abcmt.org)1. There is a doctor listed with this organization in Greensboro, NC for you folks in my area of Virginia. I don't know her and have not been to her. One good way to find a good alternative health doctor who understands mercury toxicity is to call the biological dentists' offices and ask them who they recommend. Good and experienced biological dentists work with these doctors and know who to refer their patients to. If you are sick, or want to avoid being so, you definitely need to look into biocompatibility testing of dental materials, before you start removing the mercury fillings. Go to the discussion on Biocompatiblity testing, and check with your biological dentist to see if he has this kit in his office. If you are not sick but yet you want your amalgam replaced, you could replace them slowly and safely over a over a course of time, using safety precautions recommended by the IAOMT. See www.saveteeth.org for the IAOMT protocol. Also check out the IAOMT.org web site for a story with picture of how fillings should be removed safely. It would also be easier on the pocketbook to pay for one quadrant at a time. They will have to be replaced one day because they don't last forever. Get yourself educated so you won't become poisoned when a tooth with an amalgam filling breaks or you have an emergency situation. Knowledgeable people, such as chiropractors, and alternative health doctors who know about mercury's toxicity may choose to do a complete removal of amalgam in their own mouths as a preventative measure. If I had cancer I would remove my fillings so my immune system would have the best chance of fighting the cancer. Dr. Vincent Speckhart, alternative cancer specialist of Norfolk, VA, now retired as of 2002, required his patients to remove mercury and other toxic materials from their mouths in order to take stress off the immune system. If I was having many of the symptoms of chronic mercury toxicity, I would start removing mercury fillings. If I had a neurological disease, I would start removing mercury fillings. If you choose to do a complete dental revision, then the whole mouth is revised using precautions and under the care of both a biological dentist and a medical doctor. The holistic/alternative doctor will supply supplements to strengthen the immune system and mercury removing drugs or supplements. DAMS recommends that you do not take the drugs like DMSA or DMPS until after you remove your fillings. There is so much mercury already stirred up when you are poisoned, you don't want to stir up any more with mercury fillings still in your mouth. The idea is to pull out only a little mercury at a time and excrete it. You don't want to pull out great amounts, and your body not be able to excrete it and have it redistribute back into your body. In fact, DAMS is very cautious when it comes to chemical chelators and recommends other chelators that don't involve chemicals. I have had mercury settle in my back muscles after doing a glutathione push that was too much for me. A push is a syringe that is inserted into a vein over a short 10-15 minute period. I felt like I had been poisoned all over again. It wasn't the doctor's fault. I didn't tell him I had been taking DMSA also. The combination of the DMSA and the glutathione together just pulled more mercury out of my body that what I could excrete. I had 10 fillings removed over a period of 5 office visits to the biological dentist within a month's time. If you are suffering from MS or other serious illness, some suggest waiting for longer periods of time between mercury removal. DAMS recommends only removing two fillings per session or staying in the chair no longer than two hours. On the DAMS Web site (amalgam.org), they recommend that you schedule you appointments a month apart. Some of the dentists want to get in your mouth and take out lots of fillings in one visit. You have to judge your health and what your body can stand. If I had three fillings in one quadrant and that quadrant was numb, then I would consider having all three fillings removed at one time since the area is already numb. Once again, it depends on how sick you are and what your body can stand. I know one woman who were so poisoned, that the dentist feared for her life if she didn't get them all out as soon as possible. This happened to a lady in Wales whose brain was on fire from mercury in her brain. Another thing you need to consider in choosing a biological dentists is not just whether he is safe, but is he also competent in replacing your fillings with other materials? Will the bite be right? Will the restorations look good and fit without leaks? I have had some people contact me whose dentists messed up their bites so badly they couldn't get their teeth together. Some were traditional dentists and some were biological. So if you do only a few teeth in the first visit, you can judge the quality of the dentist's work. Then he won't be redoing half your mouth and leaving you in a mess. That is why it is good to have recommendations as to a dentist's safety and skill in restorative work. It is also time to visit a biological dentist when your regular dentist wants to place a crown. My regular dentist placed a crown in my mouth that chemically and electrically interacted with the mercury filling and caused a "galvanic" reaction between the different metals in my mouth. Placing these metals together caused me to become sick to my stomach as the mercury was leaking out of the crowned tooth. I felt like I was dying and spent several nights without sleep. This is what my regular dentist did when he placed a crown: He knew that I had been taking prednisone one month previous to my dental visit with him. Prednisone, a steroid drug, makes a person more susceptible to contacting diseases. You should not have mercury removed when your immune system is compromised due to medications or illness unless under a doctor's orders. But most dentists do not take this into consideration. My dentist only partially drilled out the mercury filling and exposed me to the mercury vapor while doing so. He did nothing to build up the tooth in order to strengthen the tooth before placing the crown. He placed a crown containing metals over top of the mercury filling that interacted with the mercury filling, thus making me physically sick. This crown had to be later replaced during my complete dental revision. Cost of the crown with my regular dentist: $550 (back in 2001) and I still had a mercury filled tooth underneath! This is what a biological dentist will do to place a crown: He will not want to do mercury removal unless you are on immune enhancing supplements. He will safely remove all of the mercury filling in that tooth and not expose you to vapor while doing so. He will build up the tooth with a porcelain onlay to strengthen the tooth. He will place a crown that does not contain metals to make you sick. Cost $850 to $1000 plus and that will now be a mercury free tooth. Some of the dentists have a Cerec machine in their offices where they can make the crown or onlay on the spot and you don't have but one office visit for that tooth. So amalgam can be removed gradually or in a shorter period of time, depending on your health situation. There is a direct correlation between the number of amalgams in your mouth and your toxic exposure to mercury vapor over a lifetime. Check out other sites such as Bernie Windham's at www.DentalTruth.org He can give you the references. In fairness to my local dentist, he was not the only one to cause oral galvanism in my mouth. The dentist that I had seen in TN when my tooth first broke off had placed a "patch" on my tooth at my request. The dentist in TN should not have placed dissimilar metals in my mouth. He should not have put a "patch" on that tooth. I didn't know that dissimilar metals were dangerous in the mouth. That is when I first started tasting metal. So the poisoning started with that tooth in the dentist's office in TN. But my dentist did not tell me the truth when I asked him why I tasted metal in my mouth. If my dentist had not been "gagged" by the ADA and the VA State dental board maybe he would have felt that he could have honestly explained to me what was happening. However, since dentists are "gagged" because of fear of loosing their licenses if they tell the truth about mercury, patients have mercury-poisoning symptoms and don't even know what is happening to them. My dentist did tell me that maybe I was tasting metal because I was grinding my teeth. That is half the truth. Patients who grind their teeth do have more mercury to be released from their mercury dental fillings. However, he could plainly see the dissimilar metal that had been placed on the tooth by the dentist in TN. (The dentist in TN didn't look at the tooth; his assistant did the patching.) This is what should happen in order for patients to receive proper care from dentists. Even if the federal bill HR 4011 to ban mercury fillings is passed, people with existing mercury in their mouths will not be protected. People will not know that dentists should be using a special protocol to remove mercury fillings. They will also not know that dentists should not be placing dissimilar metals in the mouth in the form of braces, crowns, partial plates, and bridgework in conjunction with mercury fillings. For patients to be protected, dentists in VA need legislation from Richmond that would allow them to freely discuss dentistry with their patients without fear of reprisal. Hometown dentists need to be able to say, "I don't have the equipment in my office to properly remove mercury fillings from your mouth. But I am going to refer you to a special biological dentist who uses a special protocol to start removing mercury from this quadrant of your mouth. Then you can come back to me as your general dentist and we can resume our patient/dentist relationship. In the future I will only be placing non-mercury fillings in my patient's mouths. If you need dental fillings replaced in another quardrant of your mouth or if you need a crown, I advise you to go back to the biological dentist and have the mercury also taken out of that quadrant of your mouth. If you are having health problems that a medical doctor is thinking is related to mercury fillings, I would advise you to have a complete dental revision and remove all the mercury fillings." The state needs to write legislation so that dentists are "ungagged," and so they would be allowed to advertise that they use a special protocol to remove mercury fillings. They would not be allowed to advertise this now, as the VA State dental board will not allow it. Many mercury free dentists are afraid to even advertise that they are mercury free. The VA State dental board doesn't want you to know that your "silver" fillings are 50% mercury. They don't want you removing mercury fillings and they don't want you to know there is a safe protocol for the removal of mercury fillings. The state dental board believes what the state dental school teaches dentists about amalgam is "scientific" and that silver amalgam mercury dental fillings are not harmful. The favorite ADA line is "only 100 people have ever had an "allergic" reaction to silver fillings." (I guess my brain was having an "allergic" reaction when it was burning and on fire, vibrating inside my skull and causing me to have L'hermette's sign, electrical charges shooting from the brain stem throughout my body. As of 2006, the ADA can't say that any more. If your dentist tells you that only 100 people have ever had an allergic reaction ask him, "Well what about that group of over 2000 people who sent stories to the FDA in the fall of 2006 that had been poisoned from their fillings? That is a little more than 100 isn't it?" Tell your dentist to get on my web site and read victims testimonies and see their pictures and read the transcripts from the FDA web site where the FDA Advisory Panel REJECTED a report of the FDA saying the fillings were safe. I wish I had been reading an article like this before I went to my dentist in August 2001. I did not have the knowledge I am giving you. It would have been much cheaper for me to have found a biological dentist, traveled some distance to go to the appointments, and paid a little more to have the crown placed correctly without exposing me to mercury vapor. I could have avoided all this pain and suffering, the cost of DMSA to remove the mercury from my body, the cost of hormones to keep me thinking straight, and the cost of many supplements to keep me going. Here are some notes from back in 2002: Each 200-mg DMSA pill I take to remove mercury from my body costs me $1.04. Insurance has already paid for more than half of the cost of the pill, but I still have to pay $1.04. Vitamins/minerals cost me $50 or more a month and hormones cost me $45 a month out of pocket after the insurance pays its share. When I was first poisoned and received help from my ACAM doctor, I was also taking yeast removing drugs that costs more than $300 and the insurance company didn't want to pay for some of them. I also took enzymes, olive leaf extract, licorice, and other supplements that were recommended by my ACAM doctor. So it hasn't been inexpensive being mercury poisoned. Also ACAM doctors are usually not participating members of your insurance company, so the office visits also cost more. However, it is cheaper to go to one good ACAM doctor than to go to 6 MD's who know nothing about mercury poisoning. Fillings don't last forever, including amalgam mercury fillings. So it is not a question of "Should I Remove My Amalgam, but how and when will they be removed? Under what conditions will I choose to have them removed? It is your mouth. You are in charge of your own dental health. Be wise, and do it right when they need to be replaced. Gradually over a period of time you can become mercury free! Your bumper sticker should read "Mercury Free and Healthy!" December 29, 2003 update: After talking to many people who have contacted me by phone or by email, I am adding to this discussion of "Should I have my amalgams removed?" If you are sick with poisoning symptoms, don't make the mistake of waiting too long to have the dental work done. Some people keep postponing the work because they think they can't afford it. As they wait they get sicker. If you get sick enough, you may have to quit your job completely and some I have talked to have gone on disability in their 30's. If you wait until you get so sick that you can't work and then have to retire, it is likely that you would have even less money for the dental work. I think some postpone this work because they are not convinced yet that the problem is their fillings. So get convinced. Do the research before you get too sick. Don't just keep avoiding the issue. As you read more and more and you see your symptoms in the medical research, and in the personal stories, you will then be able to make an educated decision. And don't let a low score for mercury on a heavy metal's test keep you from the dental revision. It is very hard to rely on heavy metals testing for mercury. I am so glad my physician understood the symptoms and treated me for mercury even though my test scores were not very high. My husband just retired this past summer due to complications from a war injury. But before he retired, he had all the mercury removed from his teeth. I am so glad he got this work done while he was still employed. 1When I checked out some of the links to doctor's offices who treated heavy metals, some only mentioned EDTA chelation. This is not the drug of choice for mercury toxicity. EDTA attaches to other heavy metals before it does to mercury. If using chemical chelators, DMSA, an oral pill, is a better chelator of mercury according to Dr. Elmer Cranton (www.drcranton.com). It is less expensive for the patient because he doesn't have to go in for 3 hour IV's of EDTA chelation.(www.drcranton.com). www.dams.cc toxicteeth.org amalgam.org IAOMT.org Back to the top Back to Mercury Poisoned main page Disclaimer: This information is provided for educational purposes only, and does not replace a personal consultation with the health care professional of your choice. (c) 2002 by Marie Flowers.