[maxxxxx]

I think there will be a time in the future when we'll look back and think how crazy people were in 2018 pumping all kinds of known toxins into the environment. It will probably be the same incredulity we have when we look at people using radium toothpaste in 1920 or the mad hatters working with mercury the whole day and going crazy.

[gwbas1c]

I always wonder if there's a mindset of, "use it as long as we can get away with it."

We will need to significantly change our laws to fix this.

[ballenf]

It's more like "use it until there's another product that we can sell at equal or higher profit. Then get those old organophosphates (now cheap) banned by backing critical research that was previously blocked."

[jlg23]

Uhm, the idea behind of "use it as long as we can get away with it" is not the lack of laws but the lack of enforcement. No new law is going to change that.

[vixen99]

Or in 2050, wondering why in 2018, mercury amalgam (Hg is an established neurotoxin) was still in significant use (except in Norway, Sweden and Denmark) as a dental filler.

[Raphmedia]

Oh woah.

My mother has a lot of those and they keep crumbling and she has to have them changed. She swallowed a few of them. She also suffer from neurological diseases and fibromyalgia.

That those are in fact made of mercury is blowing my mind right now.

I'll advise her to get her mercury levels checked out.

[amanaplanacanal]

Other people appear to be down-voting you, so I'll comment instead: The standard defense is that the mercury is locked in place inside the amalgam, and does not migrate. I've never looked at the evidence either way.

[amelius]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3010024/

Quoting:

> The debate over the safety and efficacy of amalgam has raged since time immemorial. In recent times, it has reached such a feverish pitch that it seems to drown out all sounds of reason. Amalgam has served the dental profession for more than 165 years. Incidents of true allergy to mercury have been rare and attempts to link its usage with diseases like multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease have not been significantly proven, although there may be some association between amalgam restorations and oral lichenoid lesions.

> Marshall, in his review on dental amalgam, summed it up appropriately: “if some reported values of Hg release are extrapolated to clinical life times, the entire restoration could lose its Hg in short time. For example, a 500 mg amalgam restoration contains approximately 200–250 mg of Hg, and the entire quantity of Hg would be lost in 10,000 days if the Hg was released at the rate of 25 ?g/day. This estimate of release is of the order of magnitude reported in some studies of vapour release”.

[Someone1234]

In theory. But grinding teeth, chewing, or even brushing can cause flakes to break away. The biggest risk is actually during installation of the amalgam, particularly for dental professionals.

The real crux of the issue is that there are safer effective alternatives. So even if we call the risk "low," it is a needless risk. It only a matter of "when" not "if" these filings are against safety regulations.

[narrator]

Also drinking hot liquids can release small amounts of mercury vapor.

[patrioticaction]

They used to mix the mercury and metals on their bare hands back in the early 20th century before placing it in the tooth.

[maxxxxx]

I remember in Germany there were lots of studies that showed mercury leaking out. Dentists fought for quite a while but I don't think they are in use anymore. I got my amalgam fillings taken out in the 90s and replaced with plastic and ceramic.

[Amygaz]

They also observed that we pee pretty much all the mercury we ingest, but that methyl-mercury is the one we absorb, accumulate, and that is highly toxic.

[Tharkun]

Removing the filling seems like a great way to inhale more of the stuff. How do they prevent that from happening?

[tomhoward]

I had one removed about 7 years ago. The dentist fitted a dam to avoid fragments being ingested and to minimise vapor inhalation, and (if I recall correctly) he advised me to breathe as gently as possible during the crucial stage of removal.

[markdown]

> Dentists fought for quite a while but I don't think they are in use anymore.

The anti-dentites won.

[maxxxxx]

I think the dentists are still in use :-)

[wmeredith]

The dentists fight it because the science mostly says they’re harmless. Trust me, there’s plenty of money to be made removing the old fillings (which actually is the most dangerous time for mercury contamination) and replacing them with composites. Dentists are incentivized to do so. They just don’t want to cause unneeded hysteria.

[14]

As a person who has struggled to afford dental care over other life expenses I would strongly believe that the Mercury only stays in place in optimal conditions. I had a chipped tooth which I didn't treat right away which lead to the tooth decaying. Then it cracked in half. There was a filling that was split in half during this. It was a month later before I could afford work on the tooth. I don't know if that filling had Mercury or not but if it did, my mouth was definitely exposed to it.

[thatcat]

That's the defense against removing amalgam that has already been introduced, it's safer locked away than trying to drill it out and risking high level exposure.

[culot]

In my experience the mercury amalgam fillings tend to crumble and plop out in pieces after a few years. Maybe not the entire filling, but enough to where they'll have to declare a do-over, drill and augment/replace with more mercury amalgam.

[rl3]

Not to mention CFL bulbs. It's really great when something as mundane as a lightbulb breaking turns into a veritable hazmat situation.[0] The risk/reward ratio there boggles the mind, especially given the fact LED bulbs exist.

[0] https://www.epa.gov/cfl/cleaning-broken-cfl

[culot]

That stuff must be really super cheap, as the price difference between it and the alternatives is insane.

edit: internet searching about on this apparently shows that the price difference should not be that much??? Two different dentists want me to pay about $250+ more per tooth for non-amalgam fillings. Madness!

[ItsMe000001]

That is an insane price. Here in Germany I last paid 70 Euros on top of what insurance pays for (which is the very basics - and yes, they pay for amalgam fillings) for a composite fillings. Which one exactly I don't know but it was what I already had, and I never had a problem including with durability. When I still paid full - I switched from private insurance (I pay everything and get reimbursed) back into the semi-public system a few years ago (they pay directly to the dentist or doctor) - it was not much more though. Even the special procedure to remove the last few amalgam fillings including refilling were just some 3xx Euros for three teeth. That dentist is located in a big Bavarian city in the middle of the city in its most expensive shopping street, and yet prices are very sane (I saw and paid them in full for years since overall my costs were well below the high yearly deductible I had chosen for my private insurance).

[maxxxxx]

Agreed.

[ItsMe000001]

Sorry for the downvotes. I received chelation therapy after years and years of very strange accumulating issues that some day crossed a threshold where they could no longer be ignored. I had actually not seen that coming and called myself healthy, the human brain is extraordinarily capable of ignoring obvious problems. When I was forced to acknowledge that not all was well my world fell apart. Long story short, I found the problem after some searching. Mercury was high both in hair and in urine - I was lucky. Normally chronic exposure is next to impossible to show via such tests. After chelation mostly with DMPS, later also lots of DMSA I achieved miracles. For exanple, a double-sized right thyroid with a nodule became normal and the nodule disappeared. That condition had been there for at least 25 years (first diagnosis). It disappeared within a few weeks, after the 4th or 5th DMPS treatment the tissues surrounding that area were very active, I knew there was something going on. So I went to the endocrinologist again who did the ultra-sound twice because he did not believe it. That is just a single example of many, from psoriasis (gone) to warts on the feet (gone), eye problems (gone), never-ending colds (for months!) that had gotten worse and worse over time, and a long list of other problems.

How do I know it was the amalgam fillings? Because that was my only exposure, and because it turned out my jaw bones were very damaged - exactly were there had been amalgam fillings. It was discovered not by x-ray, several OPGs never showed anything. But when I was to get an injection into the buccal mucosa the needle went right into the bone (that's really not supposed to happen, you can't penetrate bone with a small needle used for a mucosa injection). The doctor checked and this happened in all the places where I had had amalgam fillings. He then injected DMPS in those places. A year later, and after the jaw bones had been very active (but in a positive way) the needle didn't go in anywhere any more. To this day there is (decreasing) activity in my jaw bones, and I still take chelators that have an effect right there (jaw bone).

But please, go ahead and downvote anyone who says something about amalgam fillings. I actually have a background in medical topics, from anatomy, physiology to (of course) bio chemistry, and I read quite a few studies. The lead situation was so bad that politicians actually went to action to do something about it, worldwide. Mercury is far more toxic than lead (and, according to some LD study I once found on PubMed, together about a thousand times more toxic than either lead or mercury alone). Yes, pieces of amalgam are not the problem, they go right through. And as others have said, insertion and even more so removal - with a drill creating heat which creates vapor (no matter how much you cool with water, by then the vapor already exists) - are the worst parts. I had had a few fillings removed while I was a student. Only recently, two decades later, did I connect the dots, why back then I had a huge "almost asthma" allergy almost overnight, as well as huge problems finding sleep, strange thoughts, and big problems with some joints that didn't seem to have any observable reason. The removal was without protection, the removal of the last fillings a few years ago, when I hoped I had found the problem (I did not know, amalgam removal and chelation was an experiment because I could not find anything else, and boy was I proven correct), was with good protective measures that I think worked (I didn't get worse then I already was at the time).

Here is something to consider: What happened when I started DMPS chelation was something that according to doctors doing that kind of treatment is not uncommon, so much so that I was told that might happen before it happened. The initial values went down quickly and linearly - but after a few DMPS treatments my symptoms suddenly jumped. Turned out that the amount of excreted mercury had also jumped (tripled). From then on my body became "active". All kinds of crazy stuff happened, for a long time (it's still not quite over in the jaw area). It seems that the body is overwhelmed at some point and is no longer able to excrete everything. Maybe the spikes of insertion and/or removal of amalgam fillings contribute, too much at once. After the first year I took chelators because it still helped, but it was no longer necessary for excretion, my body had become pretty active. Maybe somebody whose body can deal with the spikes, or who never experiences them, has less trouble continuously getting rid of the mercury that is released from the fillings.

Sooo many questions, and I made soooo many interesting observations. Too bad it's impossible to talk about it, even anonymously on the Internet, because for some reason this topic raises the emotions of sooo many people. That the subject is present on so many websites of the esoteric kind is because it's next to impossible to talk about it in normal circles. My insurance always paid every little thing, even the most stupid and ridiculous and useless stuff - but when I finally send them a bill that mentioned "mercury" and "DMPS" (chelator) they suddenly refused. IT was a trigger word. They had paid for dozens of doctors (that one year when everything escalated, I went to many doctors with the many issues I had, from gastroenterologist to psychologist), now, the one thing that actually worked, and which was very cheap(!), they refused. It's insane. Same here - somebody mentions the trigger words (mercury, amalgam), the comment is voted down immediately. By whom actually? Are there so many prominent toxicologists reading this?

I don't think so. Even a normal MD would not know much about it. I've actually seen this: When I go to a talk from a doctor specialized in lung disease and someone in the audience asks about something not the lung the doctor is very careful not to say anything, because it's not their specialty. Strange, everybody (including non-doctors) has a strong opinion when it comes to the subject of chronic mercury poisoning through amalgam fillings.