Episode 002 | Mercury-Amalgam Part 2 – How to test for Mercury intoxication
Transcript:
Hello and a very warm welcome to the episode 002 of Elmar´s Tooth Talk: The missing link to total health.
In the last episode you learned about Catherine and her unbelievable experience with a dismissive GP and headmaster and a tiny amalgam filling. What got her almost got sectioned, Why she could be saved from being institutionalised and How it came to an happy end.
So, before we start let me tell you, What’s in it for you toay:
We talk about:
- A very disturbing experiment with mercury
- HOW mercury must be disposed of from dental practices
- WHAT symptoms mercury can cause
- WHAT effects mercury can have
- WHERE in the body mercury likes to store
- HOW your mercury burden can be tested
- WHAT is the the SMART protocol to remove mercury fillings
- WHAT are the ingredients of amalgam fillings
- HOW amalgam interacts with other metals
Case study
Let’s start with Nora, a young, good looking, successful executive of 41 years of age, who suffered from debilitating skin problems for the best part of her last 15 years. It didn’t just affect parts of her body she could easily cover. No, also her face and arms were often covered in spots and rashes. The itching was frequently unbearable, and it was then difficult for her to suppress the notion of scratching.
Despite the use creams and potions filled with all sorts of harsh ingredients such as antibiotics steroids and other nasties she didn’t get on top of it. Whilst they helped for a short period of time it just did not solve it.
She knew, there must be an underlying problem.
Like Catherine, she went from doctor to doctor with no avail. The only advice she was given was, “you have to live with it”.
That is just not good enough for single 41-year old woman.
Despite being successful in her job, where she could deal with problems on a logical matter. Somehow this didn’t work with her skin. Something literally must have gone under her skin. And it made her insecure, anxious and shy when it came to her private life.
But not only did she suffer emotionally, the ingredients of the creams and potions taken all these years became a burden to her organs and she developed kidney problems and had to stop using the steroidal creams.
Now the pressure was even higher because she could not get away with using a short-term fix with a cream. Something fundamentally had to change. She was now forced to look beyond main street medicine, time to look into “alternative therapies”.
Unfortunately for her, neither acupuncture nor homeopathy seemed to make any differences.
Yes, on an emotional level these therapies made her feel a bit more stable, but the skin condition was still as obvious as ever. She then went to see a kinesiologist who found out that she was suffering from high a mercury load and recommended to see a dentist.
Her dentist however, said there is nothing wrong with her mercury amalgam fillings but failed to explain why she should suffer from a high mercury burden.
Amalgam fillings the culprit of it all?
Convinced her amalgam fillings must be part of her problem she came to see us.
Back in those days we used DMPS tests. It’s a chelator that is injected into the patient’s vein and then the mercury load is tested in the urine. However, we didn’t just inject the DMPS, we tested with Applied Kinesiology how much of this chelator the patient could take. And the test proved, Nora was suffering from mercury toxicity.
When to start detoxing?
The next steps were to activate her blocked detox organs – liver, kidneys, gut and skin – then to get her amalgam fillings safely removed and start a detox protocol. The detox process should only start once ALL amalgam fillings have been removed and the detox organs are working properly.
If you don’t follow this advice, you mobilise the mercury, and literally swish it around in the body, but because it cannot be excreted it ends up somewhere else in the body. This could be the explanation why patients suffer so much if the above is not taken into account.
A mere six months after removing her amalgam fillings and starting the detox, her skin began to clear and not even a year later the skin was normal again and so were her kidneys.
Her anxiety and insecurity went, she even felt an increase in energy and mental capacity. Of course, she also found her love of her life, but that is a different story ….
We have seen, mercury intoxication symptoms are many-fold from psychological, emotional, mental to neurological and dermatological problems.
If you Google “Symptoms of Mercury Intoxication” you will find a verrry long list indeed.
Obviously, not everyone is as susceptible to mercury as were Nora and Catherine. But with toxins from the air we breathe, the food we eat and the water drink steadily poisoning us, the likelihood of this susceptibility developing is increasing.
What effects can mercury amalgam have in your body?
The toxicity of mercury is specially correlated to bind sulphur compounds. Sulphur is part of proteins and proteins are the main component of enzymes which regulate the metabolism, produce energy and hormones and help detox your body.
Mercury is effectively blocking those enzymes from working properly which can cause symptoms such as chronic fatigue.
Through this suppression mechanism, mercury manipulates the body’s immune system.
The newly formed mercury compounds are foreign to your immune system therefore your immune system will fight it. This way auto-immune diseases like multiple sclerosis could develop as well as inflammation within the gut such as Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis or Diabetes.
Mercury also has the capability to replace trace minerals such as selenium and zinc from the binding points on enzymes and destroys the biological efficiency and as a result you can develop a trace mineral deficiency.
Mercury promotes the incorporation of other environmental poisons in your body and prolongs as well as slows down their excretion.
Mercury can embed around muscle and nerve tissue. One of the outcomes of this can be fibromyalgia.
Mercury boosts the formation of free radicals and therefore again encourages the formation of auto-immune diseases and increases the risk of inflammation.
Mercury damages DNA and promotes the antibiotic resistance of bacteria.
Mercury is lipophilic. What does this mean, lipophilic? This means that mercury likes fat which means that it is stored and concentrated in fatty tissues. Our brain is the fattiest tissue and organ in our entire body made up of at least 60% fat. You could actually say that the brain is nothing short of a mercury magnet.
Mercury accumulates in nerve cells which results in obstructing the absorption of nutrition as well as the excretion of waste products and it also obstructs the innervation.
Mercury destroys blood-brain barrier giving way to diseases of the nervous system such as depression, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis could be one of the consequences.
Mercury can also disturb your thyroid hormones because it acts as a competitor to iodine on the thyroid cells just like chlorine, fluoride and bromine do.
Could this be the culprit responsible for the increase in thyroid disease?
Research shows that there are hardly any malignant or benign tumours that haven’t got increased mercury levels.
Scottish undertakers are required by law to either pull amalgam teeth from corpses prior to cremation or install expensive air filtration equipment due to concerns about the amalgam mercury fillings contaminating the environment.
And it goes on:
More symptoms
Mercury can cause local symptoms in the mouth such as bleeding gums, bad breath, bone loss around teeth, burning, metallic taste, excessive salivation, white patches in mouth.
Mercury can cause local symptoms on the skin such as rashes, dermatitis, chelitis, gingivitis
Mercury can cause cardiovascular and respiratory symptoms such as irregular heartbeat, chest pain, irregular breathing.
Mercury can cause endocrinological symptoms such as chronic fatigue, low body temperature, excessive sweating, weight loss, cold and clammy hands and feet, muscle weakness, hypoxia, loss of appetite, joint pain, thyroid dysfunction, infertility
Mercury can cause gastrointestinal symptoms such as abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting colitis, constipation, diarrhea, irritable bowl.
Mercury can cause immunological symptoms such as allergies, rhinitis, swollen lymph nodes (mainly in the neck), asthma and sinusitis.
Mercury can cause neurological symptoms such as headaches, migraines, impaired hearing and visual acuity, tremors, muscle weakness, memory loss
Mercury can cause psychological symptoms such as irritability, unreasonable anger, insomnia, mood swings, nervousness, shyness, anxiety and depression.
Mercury can cause urinogenital problems such as frequent urination, night urination, kidney failure and loss of libido.
You see, the list is loooong.
Now, Let’s have a look into the dental practice.
We are told that although mercury might be a problem outside the mouth, once it is mixed and becomes solid in your mouth, it is absolutely fine and does not pose a risk to your health. That is what the dental professional bodies still try to make you believe.
However, once amalgam is removed from your mouth it must go into a special container which needs to be handled with utmost care and disposed of as hazardous waste.
Doesn’t that sound a bit strange?
In 1989 Professor Murray Vimy of the University of Calgary and his team of researchers, conducted a very interesting experiment.
The sheep Experiment
They placed radioactive marked amalgam fillings into the teeth of sheep and looked where in the sheep’s body the mercury would be found. When they looked 30 days later they discovered mercury in the jawbone, stomach, kidneys, liver and brain.
Then they measured the sheep’s ability to clear inulin. Inulin is an indicator for kidney function and it had dropped from originally 100% to only 40%.
They then removed the amalgam fillings with high precaution and safety measures and had a look at what had changed for the mercury. Incredibly, it was still in the same concentration within each of the organs (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology 1989, No 3. Vimy and colleagues).
They repeated the experiment on monkeys and found exactly the same results.
Pro-amalgam people state that sheep chew too much. Of course, the dental governing bodies stated that one cannot compare the experiment between sheep and humans as they are too far genetically apart.
That’s quite a bold statement since the majority of pharmaceutical research experiments are usually done on mice or rats. I always thought mice and rats are even further away from the human genome.
Professor Vimy said explicitly that those dental bodies who are still allowing the use of mercury in dental fillings are either incompetent or corrupt.
Further studies published in August 1989 by Vimy and colleagues (on a 32nd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Federation of Biological Societies) stated that mercury from the sheep’s fillings transferred immediately to the placenta of the unborn foetus and every conceivable portion of the foetus body and even increased further in the lamb after it was born due to mercury in the mother’s milk.
I recommend to watch the ‘YouTube’ clip “Smoking Tooth” by Dr. David Kennedy, (published at the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology (IAOMT) Symposium in 2000)
In this video clip the tooth with an amalgam filling is filmed with a special camera where you can undoubtedly see the mercury vapour leaking out of the amalgam filling. Then the mercury filling is rubbed with an eraser. What you the witness is mercury vapour coming off a 25 year- old silver amalgam filling in an extracted tooth.
The background is a phosphorescent screen. The mercury vapour absorbs the fluorescent light and you can see its shadow. This is mercury evaporating from a filling that was dipped in water that is the same temperature as the human body.
These are not small amounts of mercury it is more than a thousand times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency will allow for the air that we breathe.
The same thing happens to the mercury in your amalgam fillings in your mouth:
- if you drink something hot,
- if you chew gum,
- if you smoke,
- grind your teeth,
- brush your teeth or
- chew food.
This stimulation causes the mercury to continue to leak out of the fillings for an hour to an hour and a half afterwards.
This way the mercury leaks out of the amalgam filling into your gum, your lungs, into your blood and will then go into your nerve tissue and into your brain.
Mercury has the ability to cross the blood/brain barrier. The bad news on mercury crossing the blood/brain barrier is that it makes it permeable to other substances that would normally be blocked.
Countries that prohibit use of amalgam fillings
By the way amalgam fillings are prohibited for example in Sweden and Russia and Norway.
In other countries the use of amalgam fillings is limited and not permitted in pregnant woman, people with kidney disease and children.
A landmark agreement has been approved by the European Union to ban amalgam dental fillings for children less than fifteen years old as well as pregnant and nursing women. This took effect in 2018.
The use of amalgam in dental filings in the UK is still seen as basically harmless.
The galvanic effect
Another problem of amalgam fillings is that mercury causes a so-called battery or galvanic effect if there are other metals in your mouth or body.
This battery effect can mean that ten times the amount of mercury is leaking out of the mercury amalgam fillings if for example you have gold crowns or inlays in your mouth or an titanium hip replacement or a metal implant in your jaw bone.
On top of that a lot of patients have a metallic taste in their mouth due to this battery effect.
This battery effect can even happen between different amalgam fillings, if they are placed at different times, by different dentists or from different manufacturers.
Amalgam consists of at least 50% mercury plus silver, copper, tin and other trace minerals.
Test for mercury vapour
The vapour released from mercury fillings can be tested with a mercury vapour measure. The maximum workplace concentration in England for example is 20mcg per cubic metre.
If the measurement within a factory is measured higher than those 20 mcg per cubic metre, it has to be closed down.
A lot of patients reach this level even without doing any such things as chewing or drinking a hot drink and by activating their mercury fillings by clenching or chewing they can reach values of ten, twenty or even more times the legally allowed concentration.
Some researchers like Dr Joachim Mutter from Germany and Professor Boyd Hayley from the USA are amongst a growing number of scientists concerned that mercury has an effect in neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Autism, Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.
Professor Haley is one of the foremost experts on mercury toxicity. He became intrigued to dive deeper into this topic due to his own health experience with this mercury amalgam fillings. We come back to his research in just a moment.
How can a mercury burden be measured in the body?
The simplest method is the chewing gum test. Saliva is tested before and after you are chewing gum for two minutes. The analysis from the laboratory gives an indication of how much mercury is released from your fillings.
A breathing test shows how much mercury comes out of your lungs and once stimulated out of your amalgam fillings.
Other options are hair, blood, stool, sweat or urine analysis.
Each of this test is somehow specific for certain kinds of mercury.
The hair test, according to Chris Shade, founder of Quicksilver Scientific, is only specific for methyl mercury, which is the mercury you get from food especially fish consumption, but hair test is not specific for mercury found in amalgam fillings. Mercury from Amalgam fillings is inorganic mercury. Mercury might show up in urine, but only if the body’s detox pathways are functioning properly.
Whereas blood and stool are also meaningful for inorganic mercury. Inorganic mercury is the mercury that builds in your mouth and blood from amalgam fillings after oxidation).
Other tests such as the so-called challenging tests use chelating agents such as DMPS (2,3-Dimercapto-1-Propanesulfionic Acid) or DMSA (Dimercaptosuccinic acid) which force mercury and other minerals out of the body and are measured in Urine for DMPS or stool for DMSA.
These tests are often used when the practitioner thinks that patients with mercury exposure have a difficult time eliminating it. The mercury burden may be there but looking for it in blood/urine/hair isn’t successful if it is in the tissue.
DMPS and DMSA have be used with caution as they strip the body not only of mercury but also of many other essential minerals such as zinc, tin, copper.
The most comprehensive test at present is arguably Quicksilver Scientific’s Tri-Mercury Test which tests hair, blood and urine for different forms of environmental mercury and determines the type of mercury present as well as how well your body is detoxing it.
I can highly recommend Chris Shade’s video clips. His research into heavy metal detoxification is state-of the art.
There are other methods to test for your mercury burden such as Bio-resonance, Light-Kinesiology, Applied kinesiology electro acupuncture and others.
Autistic children
Professor Boyd Haley has observed that the lowest level of mercury is found in the birth hair of the most severely affected autistic children.
He points out that unfortunately, some patients cannot excrete mercury at all. Therefore, the tests will not show any body burden. According to his research this is especially evident in autistic patients. And he adds this has to do with a genetic phenomenon.
One gene is particularly important because it is related to the body’s production of glutathione, which is your body’s most powerful detoxifier and antioxidant. Your body can excrete mercury only when it is bound to glutathione.
When glutathione levels are low, mercury levels are high and vice versa.
Research also shows that people suffering from symptoms like chronic fatigue, irritability, mood disorders, poor concentration, headaches, and insomnia due to their amalgam fillings are more likely than their peers to have the apolipoprotein E 4 (ApoE 4) gene.
ApoE 4 is known as the “Alzheimer’s gene.” It also promotes heart disease. If you have the ApoE 4 gene your detoxifying activity is reduced. This means that you cannot get rid of mercury from your brain, which for obvious reasons is contributing to its toxic effects on the brain.
Males are 4 times more likely to develop Autism according to Prof Hailey. He argues this may, in part, be due to the effect testosterone has on mercury excretion because high levels of testosterone can block the body’s ability to make glutathione.
Also, mercury increases the body’s levels of testosterone.
By the way, antibiotics also prevent excretion of mercury, and antibiotic use seems to be higher among autistic children.
How to remove amalgam mercury fillings safely?
The main point here is SAFELY!
Mercury MUST be removed under the highest possible safety measurements and it must be removed completely. Even small specs left can have detrimental effects in susceptible patients.
It is often seen that patients proud of having their amalgam fillings just to find out that little specs are still left under the new restorations.
The IAOMT (International Academy for Oral Medicine and Toxicology) has developed a protocol for removing amalgam fillings safely. It is called SMART. SMART stands for Safe Mercury Amalgam Removal Technic and the exact protocol can be found on their website.
Part of this is protocol is
- having the patient swish activated charcoal before the start of the removal and repeat after the removal and even during to remove free-floating mercury
- I like to place a thick layer of charcoal on the gum around the teeth to give even more protection
- The patient must be covered from head to toe
- Supply of an oxygen mask for the patient
- Use of rubberdam to prevent parts being swallowed or worse going into the wrong tube
- Use of a very strong suction unit
- I recommend the use a suction device called Clean-Up which covers the entire tooth and is especially helpful if a rubberdam cannot be placed.
We also use the IQ-Air Dental Vacuum Air Purifying filter, a strong suction which removes the vapor from the work area and also cleanses the room of viruses and bacteria. It is proven to effectively filter ultrafine airborne particles.
Obviously, dental staff and the dentist have to be protected equally well.
On top of all these safety measures, we always use intra-venous Vitamin C infusions during treatment.
Removing amalgam fillings should be done very carefully by cutting and breaking the fillings rather than drilling them out using maximum amount of water to cool and clean off any mercury particles.
Prior to mercury removal the patient should be supplied with supplements to promote proper functioning of their detoxification organs especially liver, kidney and gut.
According to Dr Mark Hyman it can take up to 18 years for the body to clear only half of the mercury naturally from the body once amalgams are gone!
And how can you get rid of your mercury burden?
Now, this is a mine field.
And we cover this in an episode of its own.
Well that’s it for today.
In the next podcast we discuss some more very interesting facts about Amalgam, which have already been around since 1927.
You will hear what is printed on the package information sheet which comes with the amalgam when it is delivered into the dental surgery.
This is: Elmar´s Tooth Talk: The missing link to total health. Bye for now.