Dental Issues:  Infection and Toxic Metals

During the opening statement of a conference for dentists on oral toxicology, the convenor, himself a dentist, rocked the room:  "Folks, we dentists are responsible for 98% of the deaths in the world."  He went on to say that to the best of his knowledge, he had only killed two people, but he had been mercury-free from day one.  You can imagine the unrest in the room.

The conference was extremely well organized and it gave me an inside look at the dilemmas facing very serious health care professionals who have been as open-minded and innovative as their licenses permit them to be.  A host of problems were discussed, mainly infections that become systemic because there is so little blood circulation to teeth that treatments that might be effective when treating localized infections in other parts of the body have little chance of working with teeth.  Graphic photographs of decayed teeth, bone, and soft tissues were shown; but the point made by the dentists was that tooth infection is probably the number one cause of cardiac problems.

Next on the hit list were amalgams, a popular restoration material that contains 49-53% mercury, a deadly metal that vaporizes at temperatures well below normal body temperature.  I came to learn that some dentists take the vapor so seriously that they not only install special ventilating systems and perform oral procedures using masks, but they replace all the cabinets and sheetrock in their operating rooms every year or two. The irony is that the toxicity of mercury has been understood for centuries, but dentists have been arrested and jailed for suggesting that there might be health benefits ensuing from amalgams removal. Of course, they can always suggest removing them for cosmetic rather than medical reasons, but seriously ill patients are more likely to allocate their funds to health than beauty.

There are many toxic metals besides mercury, but mercury poisoning is a common problem because in addition to amalgams, mercury derivatives are as preservatives in many medications and vaccines.  Add what is ingested through consumption of fish and the issue of environmental contaminants cannot be dismissed lightly.  Because mercury can deposit almost anywhere, a truly enormous variety of symptoms are attributed to mercury toxicity, everything from attention deficit disorder and autism to severe neurological conditions like multiple sclerosis or even dementia.  There is a relatively new theory that the usual tests to determine toxicity might be flawed.  This is because an inverse correlation with autism was found among children who had received a similar number of inoculations.  The hypothesis now is that some people are better excreters than others so those who can get rid of the toxins have fewer symptoms despite comparable exposure to known risks.  This theory makes sense to me because it is consistent with everything I believe about individuality, body typing, and metabolism.

In my consulting work, I discovered that patients with what the dentists told me were cations had serious challenges to the immune functioning.  I was repeatedly seeing clusters of white blood cells in which anywhere from a dozen to 20 or more white blood cells were attacking something but dying very quickly.  When they die, they start to look fuzzy and as they disintegrate, it is possible to see what was underneath:  cations.  I thus asked patients about their dental work and found this correlated with amalgams.  Most of the patients exhibiting this phenomenon had many amalgams, often quite blackened.

There are clinics that provide dental evaluations that include panoramas, cavitat analyses, and biocompatibility tests with available dental materials (over 200 choices despite the handful discussed by most dentists as options.)  While this information may not be important for some people, when it is important, it is very important and could save a life.

After replacing the amalgams in one quadrant of my mouth, against the advice of the dentist, I found that I was hugely intolerant of composite fillings.  They happen to be estrogenic and for some people, especially those with no neurological symptoms at all, going from amalgams to composites could be catastrophic.  A few years ago, I stumbled on Cerec restorations.  This is an exciting alternative not only to amalgams and composites but to noble metals and porcelain.

I suggest doing a web search to learn more about this.  The short version is that the tooth is prepared in the same manner as usual:  old fillings are removed, preferably using environmentally safe techniques, including dams and masks.  Then, a camera with three lenses takes a picture of the cavity and sends the triangulated images to a computer which, with the help of a trained dentist, designs an inlay, onlay, or crown.  A ceramic block is then placed in a machine that sprays water on the block while milling the perfectly fitting (and color matched) restoration.  This takes 3-15 minutes, depending on the complexity of the restoration.  The dentist does a little tweaking and then bonds it to the tooth (hopefully with a carefully selected bonding agent that is not disastrously estrogenic.)

I will add more to this section in the days and weeks ahead; in the meantime, you may want to check out my article on kitchendoctor.com:

 

Excerpt from my article on cilantro and mercury chelation:

Many people today suffer from what is often broadly referred to as "heavy metal toxicity."  The most common source of toxicity is mercury from dental fillings. When the so-called "silver" fillings are put in the teeth, they are roughly 49-53% mercury.  In other words, the filling is an amalgam that contains some silver as well as what is for some people a lethal amount of mercury. To determine the extent of possible mercury poisoning, studies were conducted on sheep.  The fillings were removed after six months and found to contain only about a fifth of the mercury that was present when the fillings were first put into the teeth. The rest of the mercury had been leeched into the system and was found in significant concentrations in the brain and small intestines, though the liver and kidneys and lungs were also impacted by the mercury.

For the entire text, go to the article on Cilantro.

 

Ingrid Naiman
10 April 2006

 

 

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