Dental Videos

Mercury is one of the most toxic elements and a persistent traveler through our environment. So who’s the travel agent for this? Elemental poison, coal fired power plants. Most definitely mining operations. Of course. Your neighborhood dental office. Surprisingly, yes.
Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Selfy. God
Is mercury toxic. Elemental mercury is toxic. Silver amalgam fillings, does it contain mercury? It does almost up to 50%. Yes. Mercury is a toxic substance.
If you’re exposed to mercury, we start seeing much more serious health effects. These health effects would be
Chronic fatigue,
Double vision,
Couldn’t sleep,
Depression, panic attacks, memory loss, a lowered immune system, loss of vision, chronic
Headaches.
It is both an immediate problem in some individuals and a very long-term problem than others.
I started having urological symptoms. I didn’t
Feel like a human being
In the deepest part of myself. I thought I was dying.
People think you’re crazy and you’re not crazy. You have mercury poisoning.
Why is it that the A DIA will not tell the public that mercury amalgam is harmful?
Frankly, the American Dental Association welcomes new looks at all of the dental restorative
Materials. The
American people are being overtly lied to by the American Dental Association and the dental branch of the Food and Drug Administration.
4, 3, 2, 1.
You’re watching Fox 17 News at nine.
Three years ago I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a debilitating disease that scared me to death, but I stand before you tonight. Not for pity, but to share my hope that I believe could help hundreds of thousands of other sick people like me in my journey to MS and back, my aspiration was to be a journalist and tell stories that affect change and tell stories that help people and tell stories that right wrongs and expose things that need a light shined on. I just left my dream job with CBS News as a national correspondent. My husband had just left his career and we made those two decisions based on the kind of parents we wanted to be, wanted to be engaged parents, we wanted to be active parents, we wanted to be full on hands-on 24 7. Parents we’re in very much an outdoorsy family, love nature. I run or do some type of exercise workout five days a week, no issues with my energy level at all. I mean, just felt great. I mean I felt great. I typical day taking care of my kids and working and basically just focusing on my family and life was good until the day I had the dental work done.
The thing about Mercury is it looks cool but it’s not. It’s really poisonous. When you mess with mercury, when it gets in your clothes, your games, your stuff, your furniture, your house until everything it touches is
Trashed. Elemental mercury is toxic primarily through inhalation exposure and people just don’t realize how dangerous it is, but it is very important to recognize that you can’t see it, you can’t smell it, and there’s no way to know that it’s there except that we know that it volatilizes into air
And you’ll see it in literature all the time. It will volatilize at room temperature and higher. That’s a very bad misconception people have. It will volatilize at anything above negative 38 degrees. The higher the temperature, the more readily it will volatilize, the quicker it will
Ize. When a woman is pregnant, we hope that she’s never exposed to mercury vapor as we know that it can pass the placenta and cause neurological problems in the unborn baby. And if we see residences or buildings that have 10 micrograms per cubic meter or more of mercury, then we consider that it poses a health risk and we recommend that people don’t stay in the building or the residents.
10 micrograms is generally considered inhabitable without some kind of respiratory protection.
Two schools will be closed tomorrow after a custodian finds a small amount of mercury on the floor of a room at Pickman Mills High
School. Now how much mercury are we talking about? Not very much about the amount the size of the eraser on this pencil, but school officials explained to us it would only take the amount of mercury, about the size of the sharpened end of this pencil to contaminate the entire building.
They’ll evacuate a public building for a broken thermometer, but each one of your amalgam fillings contains roughly the same amount of mercury.
I had one tooth hurting, so when I went to the dentist and he looked at my mouth and looked at the one tooth, but she’s more focused on the fact that my silver fillings are 30 years old and there were eight of them and he was telling me that I needed to get all of these silver fillings out and I needed to get them replaced and I kept saying, well, this is the only tooth that’s hurting just this one. Can we just replace that one? And I let him talk me into replacing all of the silver fillings on the right side. When it came time to refill them. He said, what do you want in there? Do you want amalgam or do you want the composite, the white version? And I said, well, what does insurance cover? And he said, well, insurance covers amalgam and the composite is a little more expensive. And I said, well, oh, well, I’ve had these other ones for 30 years. They work fine, and if that’s what insurance covers, let’s just get that Again, there was never a discussion about what was in a silver filling. I never gave it a second thought. So I got four bright new shiny silver fillings put in on the right side and that’s when everything started.
I was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Kentucky. I’ve been doing mercury research since about 1985.
I came to University of Kentucky and my research here led me into Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Marks berry had found elevated mercury in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, so I did a set of studies showing what heavy metals would do this, and mercury was one of them. I put in, and at that time I had no concern about amalgam fillings, anything regarding mercury toxicity and the results were dramatic. Phenomenal data that came out was that mercury and only mercury would cause the same biochemical abnormalities as you saw in Alzheimer’s disease using our technology for evaluating the activity of certain enzymes. And then all of a sudden the problem changed. It was no longer a scientific problem that I ran into. That was easy. I mean I could do that. The problem was political. When I tried to get funded to look at Mercury as a neurotoxin and its possibilities of contributing to Alzheimer’s disease, they shut me down. My grants were just totally rejected and it said something to the effect, doc Haley has to realize we don’t need to see any more of these kinds of studies. Since that time, I have never gotten another NIH grant and that was soul destroying.
I had been funded for 20 some years of doing research. Then all of a sudden I couldn’t get a grant. I had no money to run my laboratories and I felt like I just walked off a cliff and was hanging onto that last branch and I was devastated and Sandy helped me through that. When I first wrote in those grants, I remember talking to Sandy about how important I thought they
Were.
Sandy’s
A good sounding board gives good advice and she helped me accept the fact that my ideas were not going to be accepted by the current medical establishment.
My name is Karen Burns. was a dental assistant for 24 years. I got a lot of name tags there. Time for my biannual dental appointment. Hopefully I’ll have no cavities going to Dr. Goldberg’s office. Dr. Goldberg is the dentist that I worked for, I would say about seven years. My last job that I had before I got sick, and luckily, even though we don’t agree on the issue, we’ve maintained a friendship and I go to the office parties and go to lunch with them after my cleaning today. So it was a good way to wrap up my dental career from his education and knowledge. He has a difference of opinion about what made me sick, but he doesn’t say that I’m not sick and he respects me and even respects I believe my activism that I’m doing and I tell him all the time I’m doing it for him and the girls in the office to make them safe. So it’s all good. Hey Darlene, how are you? How you doing? I haven’t seen you in a long time. Six months.
My name is Dr. Richard Evan Goldberg. I am a practicing general dentist in Monroe Township, New Jersey. I met Karen year 2000. She came to me as a dental assistant with experience. I hired her. She proved herself to be a fun, vivacious, energetic character and a good dental assistant.
Hi Dr. Goldberg.
Good to see you. How you, nice to see to see you. How’s everything?
Everything’s good. How are the boys? The boys are
Excellent. She worked with me for a few years and then at some point she physically became unwell to the point where she could no longer work. She felt fairly early on that her medical condition was as a result to her exposure of mercury and amalgam.
All right, guys. Say hello to everybody. Yeah, thank you.
Welcome. You’re doing great. I’ll see you later if you have no problems, give me a buzz.
Okay. Discussion about dental amalgams and its safety have gone back before I went to school. Big concern obviously is mercury and the mercury coming from dental amalgams and whether or not it has some kind of negative effect on individuals and to what degree can you measure it and whether or not it is to such a degree that it makes the material unsafe for usage in people.
In the early 18 hundreds, organized dentistry was still in its infancy as there were no dental schools or licensing boards. It was common that craftsmen such as the local barber or blacksmith might also practice dentistry, which at the time amounted to little more than having teeth pulled or gold fillings placed in cavities. Dental Mercury’s introduction to the United States came in 1833 by the Crau Brothers of France. They called it Royal Mineral Segund, a handmade mixture of melted silver coin shavings and elemental mercury. The lower cost of this combination of mercury with another metal, otherwise known as an amalgam, enabled a larger portion of the population to afford the services of those dentists who used amalgam fillings. But a bitter controversy started brewing over the use of mercury as a restorative material, and by 1843, the world’s first national Dental organization, the American Society of Dental Surgeons passed a resolution stating that the use of amalgam was considered to be malpractice. The American Society of Dental Surgeons asked members to sign a pledge never to place what the organization referred to as poison metal fillings and those members who did use amalgam wristed being expelled. And by 1856, the American Society of Dental Surgeons disbanded due to loss of membership
In its place rose, the American Dental Association in 1859, which to this day continues to promote the safety of mercury fillings.
Shortly after I had the dental work done, I had this heavy metal taste in my mouth and it was all day every day. It was gross it, so I started buying a lot of gum and chewing gum all the time trying to mask the taste or make it go away. Within a few weeks, I started noticing some weird neurological sensations. I started having what I would describe as pin prick feeling, and I had the sensation of cool water rushing down the back of my head and down my back and I kept just sort of passing it off as something fleeting that would go away, but it kept building the symptoms, kept building, and then it affected my vision and I had blurred vision in one eye and then I had this weird ringing in my ear. I would be in a conversation with someone and there’s like this in my ear while I’m trying to talk to someone, and the biggest effect was these deep, deep headaches and they were so deep, I mean deep, deep down in my brain.
But when I would go to the doctor and they would tell me all these possibilities of what it could be, then that would kind of make me feel, okay, this is probably in my head. It’s probably a culmination of all those things together and I’m going to be fine and I’m going to ignore this. So I would just go on about my business and think, okay, they’re right, they’re right, they’re right, and I’m wrong. This must be in my head. This must be in my head. It was in my head, it was in my teeth, so I kept believing them, letting it get worse and worse and worse until the day when I woke up and couldn’t walk.
The first time I saw Sandy was she was walking down a farm range and she would walk up and get on the same school bus I was riding on. She was the first girl I ever dated when I was about a junior in high school and I asked her on a hayride when I came back from out of the army, she picked me up. We were sitting in her car, but I asked her to marry me and I told her what my goal was was to go get a PhD in chemistry and it was going to be tough for about four or five years. You’re not going to make a lot of money.
Well, it is been very important to both Boyd and I to stay balanced and we both love nature. We both love animals, so this is a perfect place for us. It’s our refuge against the stresses of life, so we love it here. For over 20 years, Boyd has committed himself to educating people about the dangers of mercury exposure. He has traveled all over the world. Sometimes he’s gone once a month, so it’s a considerable amount of time. He has sacrificed a lot in the way of time, energy, and money. He doesn’t do this for monetary reasons. He does it because he’s so passionate and committed to the cause. It takes a very courageous person to be truthful and speak honestly as he has. I admire him for that.
But since 1991, I’ve been given talks all over the world. I was averaging over 30 trips a year,
And I testified in front of Congress. I’ve gone to Europe many, many times and that’s not an easy trip for an older person like me. It takes a lot of starch out of you. The organization that actually introduced me to the concept that dental amalgams were releasing toxic amounts of Mercury is the International Academy of Oral Medicine and toxicology. They thought it was causing a lot of medical damage and they were right. I mean, I agree with them now. I didn’t at the time. I thought that the FDA nor the A DA would allow anyone to put something in the mouths of citizens that released so much mercury vapor and not have tested it. I’ve given up a huge number of my weekends with my family to go to meetings because this is a message that has to get out that the amalgams are toxic to people and are causing a lot of problems.
I don’t see my family as much as I used to. They live here in Staten Island. I live in New Jersey. Like my husband said, most people don’t know about mercury poisoning. They don’t know anyone else with mercury poisoning. They don’t read about it in the news, they don’t hear about it. So even though I have it, they don’t really understand because they assume they see me, I’m on my feet and everything is fine. It’s kind of like they forget that I’m sick and I don’t want to be sick. FDA says it’s safe. A DA really says it’s safe, so they don’t understand how I could be sick from it and nobody else is.
Amalgams or silver fillings have been used for over 150 years. Some critics have claimed that amalgams are unsafe. This is not true.
You can’t install a mercury releasing product into someone’s mouth two inches from their brain and expect not to see some repercussions. Amalgam fillings contain roughly 50% elemental mercury, which releases mercury vapor. That is a hundred to 600 times higher than what the A estimates. The science tells us that 80% of the mercury vapor we breathe accumulates in our bodies very quickly with a good portion up in our brains.
There are vapors, mercury vapors that are emitted from dental amalgam during the mixing process. During the placement process. There’s no evidence that at this point that the mercury vapors say that are emitted are harmful.
Then I woke up the next morning and I got out of bed and I was walking sort of like this and I had to reach for the door facing as hard as I tried to get my brain to tell my legs to walk straight, I couldn’t make them work. It was
Beyond frightening. I didn’t know if I’d had a stroke overnight. I just couldn’t figure out what was going on. And I called my husband and I said, honey, I can’t walk. I was so scared. I was home alone and I knew the kids were about to get up and I’m trying to figure out I’m not going to be able to care for these children. So we went back to the doctor that day and the same doctor who had been telling me it could be all these other things, and same doctor this day after she ran a couple of tests on me, she said, just kind of in a callous manner. Well, you’ve either got MS or a brain tumor, so we’re going to get you in for your MRI later tonight and we’ll get right on this. I mean, my husband and I both looked at each other thinking, did we just hear what we think? We just heard what just happened? I’ve been coming to you for three or four months telling you something’s wrong and you’re telling me everything’s mine and now you tell me I have a brain tumor or ms.
From
There, we went to see an MS doctor and he ran butcher tests and came back and said, at this point, we’re going to hold off on treating you with any MS medication because we want to see you back in six months just to kind of see where things are and kind of get a better feel of how your body’s going to react to this disease. And I mean, I am in tears. Would you please give me these MS shots? Give me something. Slow this thing down. I’m raising babies. I need you to stop this train. And he wouldn’t give me any medicine. And now looking back, that was basically the hand of God just interceding right at that moment and saying, just hold on. Just hold on. Just wait. There’s something better.
I’m Dr. Matthew Young. I’m a general dentist here in Hendersonville, North Carolina. I’ve been here at this location for 29 years, was a traditional dentist for about 10 or 12 years, and then found out about the dangers of mercury and other dental materials. So we became mercury free, not putting in any mercury and Malcolm fillings, and then when I discovered the International Academy of Oral Medicine toxicology, then I became Mercury safe. What that means is we use special protective engineering controls for OSHA to reduce the exposure of our employees and our patients to the mercury vapor when the old mercury fillings are removed.
We’ve been out here at Dr Young’s office this week installing a multi-point mercury monitoring system that continuously and sequentially measures from eight different sample points throughout his dental office. Almost all of our other clients that deal with Mercury is are required by OSHA and EPA to measure their facility throughout the day to make sure that their employees are below the ceiling limit, which is a hundred micrograms per cubic meter. Dr. Young has taken a major step here by being the first dentist that I’m aware of to install a multi-point mercury monitoring system into his office. He’s doing everything that he can to keep his employees and himself as well as his patients safe during normal procedures that have to do with dental, mercury, amalgam fillings,
And this is what the OSHA regulation requires is that the dentist is aware of how much mercury’s in his office that the employees are educated about it. We have a heavy metal chapter in our OSHA handbook that the employees have to read and understand and they have to wear special protective gear so it keeps off their skin and they’re not allowed to breathe it, and our machine keeps track of how clean the area is here in order to stay below these dangerous levels, and I think it’s incumbent ethically upon the dentist to be aware of those risks and to also monitor and educate their employees every day.
I just flew in from Santiago Chili where I gave a presentation to a group of legislators and researchers down there, and tomorrow I give a talk to the International Academy of Oral Medicine and toxicology on how mercury causes some of the biochemical abnormalities that we see in some of the neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Haley is a research scientist and international lecturer. As a former chairman of the Department of Chemistry at University of Kentucky, he has numerous research studies published in peer reviewed medical scientific journals. He’s welcome to the podium, Dr. Boyd Haley
Mercury and Only Mercury causes the breakdown and deep polymerization of tubulin off of the neuro fiber producing neurofibrillary tangles, which is the hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. Not only that, but published studies repeatedly show that the widespread exposure of mercury and its effects on the brain explains every single aspect of Alzheimer’s disease. It is the missing piece of the puzzle that’s been literally right under the noses of researchers for all these years. N amalgams release many, many micrograms of mercury per day into our bodies, so you not only have a toxin that can do the effect, you have it placed within inches of your brain and how do you get that across to people? And I think I do a decent job, but sometimes I’m not so sure it’s adequate and a lot of people, they want my slides, anybody to ask for ’em, have my slides. You can give my talk. I don’t care. I mean, this is not information, it’s secretive or anything. It’s something that should be out there for everybody to use.
Here I was with six months to do nothing but wait and get worse, and I thought, well, what else do I have to do? But maybe try to look into this and figure out where all this came from. The very next Sunday at church, a guy in our classes said, my brother treats people who’ve been diagnosed with ms. He treats them for heavy metal toxicity related to their feelings. He said, I don’t know much about it, but I know that he’s had some success and there’s something about there’s mercury or something in these fillings. He said, do you have any of those? I said, well, yeah, I just got four new ones and I have four old ones on this side. And that was my first glimmer of hope. The first moment that I had been told anything that even remotely sounded like there might be some sort of hope out there for me, I could not believe. I didn’t know that there was mercury in the silver fillings. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, oh, this has to be a lie. I think the majority of people still do not know what these dentists are putting in their mouth and in the mouths of their children.
According to a 2006 nationwide Zogby poll, 76% of consumers did not know mercury was the main component of dental amalgam fillings. But once informed, 92% of respondents thought their dentists should be required to inform them about mercury and non mercury dental fillings prior to treatment. The majority of dentists are not aware that under the learned intermediary doctrine, healthcare practitioners are bound by law to pass along manufacturer warnings to patients.
We know that’s not being done. In fact, it’s worse than you think. It’s prohibited.
Regrettably, the American Dental Association has a provision in its code of ethics to stop Dennis from initiating communications with patients about the risk of mercury dental fillings. This what I call gag rule, has unfortunately been enforced by many dentists dominated state dental boards.
Today
I’m here with the Pennsylvania Coalition for Mercury Free Dentistry, and we were talking to patients going in to get free dental care and we were letting them know they were eligible to get a white filling for no extra cost, and that would be safer for them. A lot of the dentists that came out and dental assistants were putting their eyes up in the air. They were aggravated that we would come and talk to the patients like this. But I wish somebody told me that I was breathing in all these toxic fumes and I had no idea. And these people in the school that are being trained, they have no idea.
Well, I can’t remember when I didn’t enjoy fishing. I mean, my granddad was a person who liked to fish quite a bit and took me quite often. It’s always been a major relaxation for me.
I went to graduate school. We ate a lot off of what I either caught fishing, my wife and I or what I shot bird hunting with my dogs. Catching fish was a supplement to our diet, and since we didn’t have a lot of money, eating fish was probably better than what we could buy in the grocery store. It’s a big difference and it’s kind of sad that today the kids are told, everyone’s told, don’t eat too many of the fish. They’re too toxic. With mercury, there are fish advisories and all about almost all the water in the United States. I think it’s sad. Why go fish if you can’t eat the fish? You’re catching. You’re catching something that’s toxic. It just takes the romance and the livelihoods out of it, and I think we should do everything we can to get our water and air clean again. That means we have to stop all kinds of mercury. We can’t blame just one group and things that you can do something about like dental amalgams that should be done.
The United Nations Environment program reports that 10% of global mercury usage is for amalgam tooth fillings. This results in up to 340 tons of dental mercury journeying into the environment each year. In the United States, dentists are currently the largest users of elemental mercury. This accounts for roughly 32 tons of mercury used yearly to place amalgam restorations, otherwise known as silver fillings. Although the number of amalgams placed has decreased over the last few decades, dentists still use amalgam without precautions. So the threat of mercury exposure continues
Tonight. I continue my story with a comprehensive look at efforts to ban silver fillings across the world. This year, the US State Department proclaimed we should phase down the use of mercury amalgam fillings during international treaty talks at the United Nations, but the Mercury Treaty, as it’s called, which would affect every dentist in the world, is not a done deal yet,
Whether or not I believe that the minute amounts of inert dental amalgam that might go down into a system really will affect the water supplies of a community. I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest it. I’m always open to changing my mind
Because of the United Nations Mercury Treaty recognizing dentistry as a significant contributor to environmental mercury exposure, the EPA is considering regulations that would require all dentists to install equipment that would capture the dental mercury before it reaches the environment.
For over 75 years, consumers and dental professionals have looked for the American Dental Association seal of acceptance on products. The A DA SEAL stands for quality and effectiveness. Manufacturers who apply for the SEAL must meet certain criteria. They must provide objective data supporting the product safety.
We’ve never done any safety studies on this product. I’m the former consumer representative on the dental products panel at the FDA. If amalgam is taken to a Class three by the FDA, class three would require manufacturers to prove safety, which they never had to do. They’re not going to spend the millions of dollars to try to prove that mercury is safe when everyone knows it isn’t.
All product claims made on packaging and labeling are approved by the A DA so you can trust them.
Mine’s Christopher Shade. I have a PhD in environmental and analytical chemistry of Mercury. I developed a new testing technology for separating different forms of mercury. We use that now in clinical testing to look at how different forms of mercury go into the body and build up in different reservoirs and how they come out. We’ve run about 20,000 tests now and unfortunately, most mainstream dentists don’t come to me to look for testing. They’re taught that there is no mercury exposure, and so the only guys that I look at are the mercury free dentist, which means they’re only removing amalgam. They’re not placing it, and they even stick out from the regular population as having higher mercury levels. So if these guys who are taking every step they can to lower all of their occupational exposure, just imagine what the dentist to take no precautions look like.
I had a regular life, everything was going good, and when my daughter was about two years old, I started to get sicker and sicker. I finally went to holistic doctor and they asked what I did for a living and I said I was a dental assistant.
A dental assistant has the potential to have a very high amount of mercury in the brain. Neurological symptoms happened to be the most dominant symptom in the constellation of problems that Mercury can create.
Well, I’ve been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, so they tested my hair and my urine and found out that I had full blown mercury poisoning.
Karen Burns urinary levels at the time of her sickness were well within the range where this could be an issue. So she had sufficient exposure to cause serious neurological effects, and
This was causing my fatigue and my muscle pain and my lower immune system, my rashes, the numbness in my hands and fingers and feet.
So a lot of these fatigue symptoms that come along with the mercury exposure, along with the emotionality are very, very obvious repercussions of a mercury toxicity.
I worked for over 20 dentists. None of them ever said amalgam wasn’t safe. They didn’t tell anybody that there were warnings on the labels.
We discovered that when you remove these old fillings with the dental drill that a large vapor of mercury is exposing the patient and the employee in the workplace. So we put in protective engineering controls to filter the air, filter the water, and to reduce the patient and employees exposure to that toxic level of mercury.
I don’t particularly have great concerns with the removal of dental amalgams and like I have said to you, if something came up tomorrow where I thought there was some convincing evidence that it would show some kind of harm, of course, then perhaps I would change
Barnes versus curb. David Barnes is a dentist in Shelbyville, Tennessee. He hired me and off we went against the largest manufacturer of dental amalgam in the country Kerr Corporation. What they did was present evidence that their warning was adequate. Kerr’s warnings are published in material safety data sheets that they’re required to distribute with their product, but the warning essentially said that Mercury is a neurotoxin and it was at least arguable that all the things that Kerr was warning about happened to burns. So Kerr’s position was this is a dangerous product. We told you it’s a dangerous product and the case ought to be dismissed because you’ve been adequately warned. Okay, little history here. When dentists go to dental school, they’re taught that mixed dental amalgam is completely inert. And so when a dentist goes in to grind out an amalgam filling, he’s creating tremendous quantities of mercury particulate.
The particulate is bound to the other constituents of amalgam, but Barnes was absorbing tremendous amounts, thousands of micrograms of mercury a day and ultimately began to suffer very predictable consequences. Back to our case, Ker tells its warning is adequate. We say, no, it’s not. The vast majority of the mercury going into his system is from this mixed in amalgam, and it was, I don’t think anyone argued with that. So is the warning adequate if it only tells him that mercury is poisonous? To my surprise, the district court said, yeah, it is adequate. The manufacturer didn’t say that the poisonous mercury would be any less poisonous when mixed with the other dental amalgam constituents. The appellate court and a published opinion also felt that the adequacy of the warning was such that Barnes was or should have been aware that mixed dental amalgam was completely poisonous.
I have been pushed by the A American Dental Association as somebody’s on the lunatic French and what’s lunatic about the fact that somebody’s putting a most toxic metal known to man in your mouth and I’m saying, Hey, we really need to look at this. This may be the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. We have to do something. We have to come up with something that’s very dramatic. I am going to visualize the mercury vapor rolling off of these amalgams when you put a drill on them or when you abbra them in any way. This will leave no doubt in people’s mind that there’s a lot of mercury coming out of dental amalgams when you put ’em in, when you take them out. I’m very optimistic. This may change the entire attitude of the American Dental Association.
Dr. Boyd Haley coming from University of Kentucky up at Lexington, and he’s going to help us to put the box together where we’re going to visualize the mercury vapor. Yeah, the first smoking tooth video shows a 25-year-old amalgam that from an extracted tooth and they put it in front of the mercury lamp and you can see exactly how much mercury is vaporizing off the filling. When you see this for the first time, it’s quite a shock to see the of mercury and the volume that your patients are either breathing or swallowing. And from then on, I knew that I wasn’t going to place any more amalgams and when I removed them, I was going to do it safely. I just think the best thing to do is to keep in mind that our ethical cred is to do no harm. I think the biggest confliction from anybody who first joins the ILMT is you’re going to have to talk to the same patients that you just put the mercury fillings in maybe a year ago, two years ago, and tell ’em that you’ve learned this new information about it.
I think you have to come to terms in your own ethics in your own heart as to how you’re going to communicate that and how you’re going to present that to patients without feeling like you’re contradicting your previous work. The most beautiful part about the whole transition is that your patient loyalty really blooms tremendously because it seems like the patients know more about this than the traditional dentist do. We’re finding out that Mercury’s been taken out a lot of other medicines and other industries in the world, and it’s soon going to be removed from dentistry according to the UN Treaty in 2013. We hope so when the times change, it’s wise to change with them.
There’s a difference between someone coming in here and being concerned about the safety of the amalgam and after me educating a patient who’s a lay person who’s not in the profession and may just have heard something from a fairly uneducated journalist about this that I will, after that discussion, they still feel that they would like him removed. I might consider doing it for them,
Okay, this is going to be a lot of money. It sounds crazy, looks crazy, and if this works, why isn’t everybody doing it and where are we going to find the money to do this? And what if it doesn’t work and we’ve poured all this money down the drain, then what am I going to do? And my husband and I talked about it, prayed about it over several weeks and we decided that we needed to get these fillings out and just see what happened. And that was 10 grand.
I have a real hard time with is when you have doctors espousing removals of dental amalgams because they believe that some systemic illness is the cause of it.
And within a week of getting the silver fillings out, the mercury out of my mouth, I was 50% better.
The science is not very convincing. It’s not because you can find people with these conditions without dental amalgams in their mouths.
The dental industry promotes a stance that on its surface seems simple and adequate. It says that if she got sick from mercury, then all the dental assistants would be sick from Mercury. All the dentists would be sick from Mercury, but they’re not. But if you really understand the complexities of biochemistry, genetics, and genetic susceptibility, you’d see that that’s really a flawed scientific stance. Lead will increase the toxicity of a known amount of mercury over a hundred fold. And so when people say, well, we can look at people and they don’t have enough mercury to be mercury toxic, I would say, you’re not that smart. You have to know what the lead concentration is in that person.
Every human body has a genetic predisposition to handle toxicity a certain way, and that’s what’s so frustrating is they just feel like they can dismiss all of this information and all of these studies and all of the stories like mine of people being cured because not everybody who has amalgam feelings gets sick,
And there’s a very strong biological reason for this, and it comes down to the individual susceptibility. Most of this is genetic susceptibility. Certain people will get sick, will have symptoms at much lower levels of exposure than other people.
But what I personally would not do is if somebody came in with say, multiple sclerosis and said, I heard that if I remove all these dental fillings, my multiple sclerosis is going to go away, I won’t do that. I will tell them that I do not believe that that is the science at all. I’m not convinced of it, and that I would perhaps be doing more harm to them than good in trying to remove these things.
Dental amalgam has been used in dentistry for over 150 years and was grandfathered into use by the Food and Drug Administration because of this. The product was not classified. In 1976, Congress passed a law mandating that the FDA classify all products which had been grandfathered into use after 33 years of ignoring the congressional mandate to classify amalgam fillings. The FDA was sued
Charlie Brown, national Counsel, consumers for Dental Choice. Our mission is to ban the use of mercury based dental fillings known incorrectly as silver fillings. We sought a court order to order FDA to classify the judge. Ellen Hove said, that’s enough. You go into mediation. You come back here a week from Monday and you tell me what date you’re going to classify. Amalgam said that to FDA.
The federal government is again going to look into the safety of the fillings that tens of millions of us already have. The fillings in question are the silver kind, and the concern here is mercury, which is an ingredient. The American Dental Association insists the fillings are safe, but many people believe the mercury can lead to serious health problems.
I’m going to take the dog for a walk. Okay.
Our whole lives changed because of this. In the beginning, it was hard for him to understand this too, and I was lucky that Nick went to a health conference and a holistic dentist was there and he lectured, and then my husband came home and took his retirement money out so that I could get chelation. That was the first time that I got the chelation. So yes, he’s been really supportive, amazingly supportive.
When you get something like this, you just want to go crawl in a hole and just say the heck with it. I’m out. See you. I mean, I never could have made it through this without Chris, and he’s so strong. He’s strong in his faith. He’s strong emotionally. He just kept encouraging me and telling me it’s going to be okay.
We’ve got such a great marriage. I mean, she’s my best friend. It just doesn’t matter. Nothing’s going to get between us including a sickness.
I know how sick she feels, and I just try to do whatever I can to help her, and I think she appreciates that
It has affected our relationship and our life. It’s totally like upside down.
Well, it was a good defining moment in our marriage because when you get married, what are the vows? Through sickness and in health, right?
Every step of the way, it’s like, it’s going to be fine. We’re good. We’re together. I’m not leaving. I love you. I don’t care if you’re in a wheelchair. I don’t care if I have to pick you up. We’re just going to pick you up and take you wherever we’re going.
I did what I had to do to be a supportive husband in every way possible. So it wasn’t that big of a deal. It’s what I signed up for and it’s the way it should be.
I’m glad that he had the foresight to see farther down the road and to not be as frightened as I was.
It’s brought us closer in some ways, but there’s days when it catches up to me catch up to her. It’s like we all want to just go to bed and try to hope that tomorrow would be better, but it’s not always easy.
We’re going to go to Walmart and pick up some material to make a box so we can video Mercury leaving a dental amalgam like you would do in a general chemistry experiment. The most uneducated person that’s going to look at that and say that is mercury vapor coming off of an amalgam that’s been in my mouth for 20 years. This is a really inexpensive experiment. The A DA and the FDA could do this with their lunch money, and yet they refuse to do it and they’ll even make claims that what we’re doing can’t be repeated, and it’s something that’s done in so many general chemistry laboratories that you can deny that what it’s measuring. Dr. Matt Young and I are going to make this box and demonstrate this. Hello, Matt. Oh, hey Boyd. Good to see
You. So glad to have you. Thanks for coming.
My pleasure. This mercury vapor is, you can’t see it in the daylight, and if you breathe it, you can’t taste it. You can’t smell it. So what we’re hoping is that when we make visuals showing this mercury vapor rolling off of these amalgams, when you put a drill on ’em that the dentist will all of a sudden, oh my God, these guys aren’t lying. There’s a lot of mercury coming off. We can visually show it. And this is an approach that’s been developed by chemists to activate a mercury lamp. A mercury lamp is a lamp that contains mercury vapor that you run a kern through, and that mercury emits a light of a spatial wavelength that water and air will not absorb. However, if you place it in front of that lamp, an amalgam and a tooth, and you activate that tooth by brushing it, then millions and millions of atoms of mercury come off of that tooth. When the atom of mercury gets in between the screen and the lamp, it absorbs that photon and blocks that light, and it looks like there is a shadow made on the screen where the mercury is absorbing the light. So what you’re seeing is really an absorbence of the photon by the mercury atom that reflects as a shadow on the screen.
In addition, there’s a lot of skeptics out there that think this is water vapor coming off the teeth and not actually mercury. We want to prove once and for all that it’s actually mercury vapor that’s coming off. We also have a hole in the top of the box with which we’ll insert our probe, and this is going to go to the Mercury 3000 mass spectrophotometer, and this is going to go into the top of the box like this so that a sample of the air during these procedures can be measured accurately.
Are you prepared to take the oath, Senator? I am.
I Brock Husain Obama. Do solemnly swear I will not back down from protecting our kids from mercury poisoning.
While the FDA was working on the classification, newly elected President Obama had nominated Dr. Margaret Hamburg to be commissioner of the FDA.
It is a privilege to be here today to discuss my nomination as Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. To me, this means operating an agency that is accessible and transparent. The FDA has responsibility to ensure that its work is driven by the best possible science and is undertaken with integrity, openness, and credibility. I’m happy to answer any questions that you may have.
Senator Enzi
Is during her confirmation hearing, she was asked of her position on dental amalgam.
She’s asked about the rule and the Senate confirmation. She should have said, I’m recused from that rule. Instead, she didn’t.
Dr. Hamburg failed to disclose to Senator Enzi that she was a board member of Henry Schein, the largest distributor of a amalgam in the us. After her appointment was confirmed, Dr. Hamburg inherited the oversight of the amalgam rule. Already in progress at the FDA
Hamburg had a conflict that should have resulted in her dismissal for his commissioner. They made her sign an ethics contract that said, I will not participate in any matter affecting Henry Schein as long as I own the stock or stock options. So she checked the price of her stock options a day before the meeting that she knew was being held. July one, she had the meeting to discuss the amalgam rule with Susan Runner and other top FDA staff. She went ahead and worked on the Henry Schein rule while she owned the stock options in mid-July. She said, okay, I’ll recuse myself for ethical reasons. She will not disclose how she recused herself when she recused herself, whether she recused herself, we take their word for it. You understand a recusal is normally a written phenomenon. The judge says, I’m off this case. The commissioner says I’m off this case. She never wrote down anything hoberg. In the final weeks before the rule wrote, Henry Shine’s lawyer and said, I want to un recuse myself. Will you take back the stock options? I want to get back in and regulate for you. I want to regulate for you. I want to in my recusal of anything affecting you so I can go back, take my stock options back, and the guy was happy to do it.
I knew from my research that getting the fillings out alone was not enough because the mercury from the fillings is stored in your tissue and it particularly likes the central nervous system. So I knew that I needed to take that next step and trying to decide, do I really need to get chelation and if so, how do I go about this? And I never would have figured all of this out if it weren’t for God’s guiding hand.
I never will forget. One day I was at the Y and I had finished my workout and I’m just praying and meditating and I’m just saying, God, if I’m not supposed to do this, just let me know. I mean, I’m already better without these feelings and I can already feel my body’s calmed down. It’s not as agitated and I’m not twitching as much, but I’m good. I can live with what I’ve got. If I’m not supposed to do anything else, if I’m not supposed to go get chelation or pursue any other experimental treatments, I’m good. Just let me know. Give me a sign. Just give me a sign that I’m on the right track. And at the place where I work out, they have a basket of Bible verses as you walk out and they call it spiritual vitamin. And I grabbed one on the way out that day and it said, you’ll know the truth and the truth will save you free. And I knew
These treatments were IV treatments and I did it for a couple of years and then my veins collapsed. I had no veins left. I couldn’t do it anymore. So even if I had the money, I don’t even know if I could get chelation at this stage of the game.
If you’ve had a bad amalgam removal or a period where you had high mercury exposure, often long after that mercury you are exposed to is gone. The damage from that remains,
I don’t know what to say or what to do. I mean, this has been a long haul. I’ve been sick now for 15 years. There’s so many days out of the year that I can’t even get out of bed every day. You wake up and you feel like you have the flu, flu-like symptoms, and you’re just sick as a dog and you push yourself, push yourself, push yourself because you want to maintain what little life you can.
My big concern was A, for her health, but B, also for whether or not she was going down a rabbit hole with no end. I may still feel that way to some degree.
I don’t see it in my lifetime it ever getting straightened out and people ever believing what happened to me.
A recent study by the Food and Drug Administration found no valid evidence that amalgams are unsafe. That’s great news for patients and dentists alike.
The International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, a scientific organization made up of dental, medical and research professionals immediately started combing through the new rule and found many glaring errors all in favor of the safety of amalgam. The
Petition for Reconsideration challenged the FDA final rule on regulatory grounds and scientific grounds. We found 27 propositions of error, and I mean big errors in the FDA’s final rule. The public doesn’t know it because the public doesn’t keep up with this, but the FDA knows it. Amalgam somehow gets a free pass. I don’t understand it and I can only assume that it’s political influence brought by the A DA that’s causing these arant results.
Not everyone agrees with a new food and drug administration report that’s out this week. It says Silver dental fillings are safe. In fact, The final rule of the classification was a huge disappointment to health advocates as it declared the mercury vapor released from amalgam fillings to be safe for anyone and everyone with the news that there would be no constraints upon the product. Henry Shine stock sword.
Bert writes him the day the rule comes out and says, my friendships with Henry Shine outlasts my recusal, my friendships outlast. My Recusals shine stock jumps a buck and a half. July 30th. The General counsel writes, Margaret Hamburg, we are indebted to you for your workers’ commissioner. We are indebted to you.
That’s the kind of thing that happens in Washington that creates in everybody’s mind that we’re all corrupt up here. Well, I’m Congressman Dan Burton from the Fifth District of Indiana, and when you find out that government officials who are making decisions regarding the health of the nation are doing questionable things, it only adds to the problem. People should have confidence in the government that we’re trying to do the best we can for them. And if the head of the FDA has stock in a company that makes dental amalgams and they’re making rulings, they should be recusing themselves. And if they don’t, I think that they’re guilty of criminal activity. And the reason I say that is because I am convinced after having been the chairman of government reform and oversight for six years and had numerous hearings on the subject that the mercury and the amalgams does cause human neurological problems.
She should not be FDA commissioner. Absolutely not.
I literally put myself in that doctor’s hand and just went with it. I am seeing an osteopathic doctor began intravenous chelation of EDTA and DPS. It’s kind of like chemotherapy. That’s what it’s like. You get an injection, you get an iv, and you just kind of sit there for a couple of hours and there was this big bag of liquid being poured into your body and it’s frightening. I made it through the whole day and I felt normal, and then I slept great and woke up the next day and I thought, well, okay, I survived it. There must be something to this.Then I went back for my next treatment the next week, and then I started feeling so much better. I mean, I just had an extra kick in my step. I’m thinking, okay, I’m onto something here.
And each treatment just reinforced what I had researched. And it may not work for everybody, and I’m certainly not saying that it will. And I think that there’s something to be said of starting early. In my case, we arrested it early, we arrested it, contained it, stopped it, and I’m good. But there are some people who’ve been sick for a long, long time and it’s hard to reverse damage if it’s been going on for a long time. I definitely felt vindicated and I think I told my husband that. I said, oh, I feel so vindicated. I said, now, I mean, look at me. I’m so much better and I can’t even believe it. I feel like I’m not crazy anymore. I feel like this is valid. This is real. More people need to know about this. And that’s when my husband started saying, well, you need to tell people. He say, honey, you sure are doing good. You really need to tell people about this.
This morning is the open public hearing. Could you state your name?
My name is Karen Burns, and I was a dental assistant for 24 years until I couldn’t work anymore. When I first started dental assisting, we didn’t wear masks or gloves. We had a bottle of mercury and silver pellets that we put together by hand. We didn’t understand that these vapors were everywhere. You must see the damage that it’s doing. Why should anyone have to suffer this illness when it can be totally eradicated? I hope you people just listen and find it in your heart to really consider all of this. It’s a real thing. It thank you.
For the most part. I generally approached it with a skeptical eye, and I did not do that necessarily because of any ill will, but because sometimes if you follow a certain orthodoxy that’s wrong. Whether it be a flat earth theory or anything else, you’re not getting to truth. And of course, I think in the end you’re looking for truth.
We just finished constructing our visualization box, which is made out of everyday materials that you can get in any hardware store. Typically, in most dental schools, it’s been taught that the mercury is trapped within the matrix of the amalgam. And so therefore, we’re trying to visualize here, improve that. There’s a significant amount that comes off during the mixing, during the packing, and then we’d have some teeth with the amount that’s been set for a while, and we’re going to be removing that with a high-speed dental drill in order to visualize how much vapor comes off during that procedure as
Well. The American Dental Association has made the argument that mercury is fixed in amalgam fillings and it doesn’t come out easily. And what this research that we’re doing here visually shows is that when you drill on an amalgam filling that dramatically exposes the patient and the dentist and the dental technician to huge amounts of mercury vapor that enters the body. It’s even worse than what they imagined,
2,483 micrograms per cubic meter, and I’ve never seen levels of mercury this high. That’s pretty much unheard of in any type of work environment.
It definitely shows with just absolute fact, hard science that amalgams when they are heated with the drill by drawing on them, release copious amounts of mercury, a vapor into the air.
Clearly, if you’re not measuring it, you’re not monitoring it and you’re not educating these employees, then the OSHA regulations are not being upheld.
And so I just asked the a DA, do you care about your own people? I mean, these are people who are members of the A DA and you’re exposing ’em to high levels of mercury vapor by still supporting the use of dental mountains.
The a d as me is just simple, and it’s been this for many, many years, and that is that amalgam is a safe and effective dental material
Disconcerting that despite all the regulations regarding mercury in the workplace, mainstream dentistry still promotes these fill-ins is perfectly safe.
The science hasn’t changed. The science has been this way for decades. Unfortunately. There’s some groups who don’t accept the science, who like to rely on fear and other factors.
The A DA is a group that just dismisses and denies without doing any experiments. They could be doing the same experiments we’re doing, showing that mercury doesn’t come on. I want to see them do that.
What patient safety and science shows us, what science shows us now is that patient safety is absolutely protected with dental amalgam material.
When a dentist goes in to grind out an amalgam filling, he is creating tremendous quantities of mercury particular.
So for that period of time they’re working. There are a hundred fold over the recommended levels for air in a workplace. It’s no wonder that people like Karen are going to have an issue with being in that environment.
I don’t believe that the vapors that come off from an removal of an amalgam are going to put a patient in harm’s way, nor do I believe it will put me in harm’s way. Although we have masks, of course, that to some degree protect us, and
Dental gove taught us nothing about protecting the dentist, the staff or the patients from the dangers of mercury vapor
Dental schools ought to be fearful of major lawsuits because this is not a secret anymore. You can see it coming out. I mean, the exposure to mercury to those people is just tremendous.
We’re turning now to the OSHA hazard communication standard. It is a final regulation and there is no escape for it for any of us.
Everyone working around hazardous chemicals and other toxic substances has a right to know of possible dangers and how to protect themselves.
Healthcare professionals and folks all over the country are asking the Food and Drug Administration to protect and inform the public about the potential dangers of silver amalgam fillings. Those include my colleague Stacey Case. Now, we’ve been following Stacey’s personal story for months now, telling you about her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis after a routine dental procedure, and tonight Stacey is in San Francisco sharing her story with the federal government.
Nearly four years ago, I let a dentist talk me into having four 30-year-old silver mercury fillings replaced because he said they were cracked. Your agency at the time though the FDA had done nothing to warn me and educated professional that this was a health hazard. This is a great injustice. Seven months after that dental work, I got out of bed one morning and could not walk. My children were two and three at the time. My immediate concern was, will I be caring for them or will it be the other way around? I now know that I and millions of other Americans are genetically predisposed to autoimmune disease, and these mercury fillings are the trigger in many cases. I’ve read several dozen scientific studies. One such study, 1990 University of Denmark proves monkeys with mercury dental fillings stored it in their spinal ganglia, pituitary gland, and many other organs. This stuff seeps into the body from the day it is implanted. Then one day you reach the tipping point like I did, and disease sets in
Your handpicked scientist in 2006 and 2010 have made you keenly aware of the health risks and the disease causation. Please do not ignore them or injured consumers like me any longer. You really want to help this country get healthcare costs under control, ban, amalgam. You really want to see a cure for many autoimmune diseases, ban amalgam. You really want to ensure American moms like me can play chase with their children in the yard ban amalgam after two decades in the news business. I know the truth and the truth is silver mercury fillings are causing disease and they are making people sick, keeping them sick. So help me, God, use your power and position for good. Dr. Shean, leave a legacy. Please, right this wrong.
We’ve gone back and we looked at the evidence and what I can tell you is we intend to come out with announcement by the end of this year.
Since that missed deadline, the FDA has been silent on where the ruling stands.
Obviously, this has been an emotional journey, but an important one, and I just hope that my story affects change in San Francisco. Stacey Case, Scott, back to you.
We’ve gone back and we looked at the evidence and what I can tell you is we intend to come out with an announcement by the end of this year,
And so 2011 came and went and sometime early in 2012, I sent an email to my contact at FDA response I got was, we’d love to respond. We sent our document to HHS for approval and unfortunately we don’t have a response back yet. We sued FDA to compel them to respond to our petitions after waiting very patiently for five, six years, and they did. So in January of 2015, they came out with a document that completely affirmed what FDA had found in 2009, which was that mercury fillings are completely safe. We might team IAMT, we were all deeply disappointed,
And then
We get this whistleblower document. It was a document that provided prohibitions on placing mercury fillings in tens of millions of people.
What happened here? What happened? HHS came back and provided a political solution to a thorny scientific problem. HHS put the veto on this statement of policy that would’ve been published by FDA, but for HH S’S political decision, not scientific political decision to not change the way the game was played, but don’t be deceived. There are hundreds of peer-reviewed, published scientific studies by top authors that associate the mercury and fillings of systemic disease. And so going forward, what are we going to do? We’re going to go back to court and take this document that was issued way back in 2012 that states what FDA really thought about all this and ask the court to reinstate the 20 document. That’s our plan
Girl. And so coming out here, just very relaxing, Mandy, she takes off and it’s a real good working relationship. No one’s ever put mercury vapor in an animal that didn’t make that animal sick, and yet our government says, but you can’t prove that it’s toxic just because it’s there. The science is there. It’s very clear. Anyone that has two neurons left rubbed together can look at the research data and see that mercury should not be placed in the mouth of a child or to anyone. And yet you can’t get an honest discussion with our government or with the medical authorities about this problem. We have not had any success taken to them, the most solid science and I mean tons of it. So no, I’m upset about it and the science is on my side. United Nations environmental program is eliminating mercury because all the scientists in the world are worried about mercury decreasing the health of all humans from any source. The overall treaty that was accepted had amounts as a product that needs to be phased out, and that’s really great news to us because that means we’re we’re at the beginning of the end for amalgam fillings in the world. I think the job now is to educate the American people. If you go to a dentist who says amalgam fillings are safe and should be placed in your mouth, then you should find yourself another dentist.
Despite a wealth of studies showing the harm of Mercury as released from the product, the American Dental Association continues to promote the safety of mercury fillings and supports. Its use for anyone and everyone without regard for reproductive status, age, or any of the known factors that make a person unusually susceptible to the effects of Mercury.
Hi, I am Dr. Jerry Tuller of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology. Our organization has been a leader in Mercury safe dentistry for over 30 years. I know it might be hard for some to fathom that measuring and visualizing mercury vapor during routine dental procedures could be as easy as portrayed in the movie, but it is. In fact, if you’re skeptical of the findings in the movie, we encourage every dental professional to take the Mercury Measurement Challenge.
Our organization has partnered with Mercury Instruments, USA to offer a discounted rental of their equipment. For any dentist who wants to take the Mercury measurement Challenge, you’ll find that the Mercury vapor released during the placement and removal of dental amalgam fillings exceeds occupational safety limits that requires employee protection. The American Dental Association recommends that dentists periodically monitor their office for dental mercury vapor, but that suggestion does not go far enough to make dentists truly aware of the risks of working with Mercury. It is important for every dental professional to be aware of occupational safety requirements to protect and inform our staff from any toxic exposure, but it all starts with being informed. I encourage you to visit the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology website. Go to www.iomt.org for more information on the Mercury measurement challenge.
I watch it fall down to the ground, cut off the things that weighed me down. There’s nothing left. I’m trying to hide living life now. Feeling free inside. Feeling free inside. I see the beauty of the sun. Another day has just begun. I start to dream and start to see, wonder what the world has for me, what it has for me.