Opposing views: internet posters over amalgam fillings

SoCalGal wrote:

Watch How Mercury Causes Brain Degeneration (Short Video)

In 1984, thirteen dentists were sitting in a hotel discussing a seminar they had just attended on the dangers of mercury from dental amalgam fillings. They agreed that the subject was alarming. They also agreed that the seminar, though long on fireworks, was short on science, and if there really was a problem with dental mercury, the evidence ought to be in the scientific literature. So, like thirteen musketeers vowing "all for one and one for all," they set out to find the evidence, or failing that, to sponsor new research that would provide the answers they sought. Shortly thereafter 'The International Academy of Oral Medicine & Toxicology'...was formally chartered for this purpose as a Canadian non-profit corporation, which it remains today.

....  The Academy and its members have chronicled and promoted the research that has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that dental amalgam is a source of significant mercury exposure, and a hazard to health. One such piece of research shows how mercury causes brain degeneration. To see for yourself click on this link:

weblink:movies.commons.ucalgary.ca/mercury

mareke wrote:

What this video fails to mention is that the mercury used in dental amalgam is inert and not the kind that causes damage to people’s brains. Mercury that has been for example absorbed by fish which are then eaten by humans can cause damage as evidenced by Minimata disease in Japan where people that ate fish heavily laden with mercury dumped into a bay around the shores of which the people lived developed horrible symptoms of damage from the mercury they ingested by eating fish they caught from the bay.

I've been told by my dentist that the mercury in amalgam fillings does not do this and even if ingested is passed through the body without harm because the mercury has to be the sort that has been absorbed by an animal like a fish that people then eat and only the mercury ingested this way in an organic form is absorbed by the body in a way that is known to do damage. You could swallow liquid mercury and it would pass right through you doing little or no damage because it would not be absorbed whereas the organic form found in the tissue of fish is absorbed and goes to the brain.

My mouth contains a large number of amalgam fillings, in fact a very large number of amalgam fillings. I remember in the past before dentists started using rubber dams to catch any debris produced by drilling having amalgam fillings redone and my swallowing many fragments of amalgam fillings and this combined with the large number of amalgam fillings I have should have caused brain damage if we are to believe the scare mongering sort of misinformation shown in the video.

I'm 54 years old and on IQ tests I score in the 150+ range so the mercury I have in my fillings and that has gone down my throat over the years appears to have done my brain little or no harm as far as ability to solve problems goes. The scaremongers would probably counter this by saying that I probably had an IQ of 180 before all that mercury damaged my brain and now I'm only moderately bright!

I remember as a child growing up catching literally thousands of fish from the age of about 8 to 18 from a nearby river into which a local factory called The Sulphide Corporation owned by a large multi-national company dumped its waste of heavy metals like mercury into the river before it was realised that this could be dangerous to people’s health. Today the same river is now fenced off and fishing is strictly forbidden because of the layer of toxic waste (primarily heavy metals of which mercury would have been one) deposited on the bottom of the river from many years of dumping waste by the factory and also a sewerage treatment works into the river.

I would have much more chance of getting brain damage from the literally thousands of fish I ate that I caught from that river than from my many amalgam fillings yet I continue to score as highly on IQ tests now as when younger and show no sign of the damage that the scare mongering video I watched would have me believe I could have. A video that was probably produced by dentists with a vested interest in persuading people to have their amalgam fillings removed at great expense and no scientifically verifiable benefit.

The video also mentioned that mercury produces the sort of brain lesions similar to those seen in alzheimers and implied that mercury may be responsible for or contribute to people getting alzheimers disease but recently I saw a program on TV that showed that scientists have discovered that the lesions seen in the brains of people with alzheimers disease are actually the result of ruptures of microscopically tiny blood capillaries in the brain which rupture over time because of high blood pressure and poor blood vessel health that often accompanies the aging process. These tiny ruptures on healing cause a tiny piece of scar tissue to be left behind which is the plaque seen in brain scans of people with alzheimers disease. The plaque is actually the end result of this process of the rupturing of blood capillaries and has nothing to do with mercury in any direct way.

The scare mongering seen in the video comes from the flawed logic that the mercury in an organic form that causes damage such as when people ingest mercury in fish tissue therefore causes damage when present in the non-organic relatively inert form in amalgam fillings. This has not been established and until it is established there is no good reason why anyone should needlessly worry and be duped into paying thousands of dollars to have their amalgam fillings removed and replaced with fillings made from inferior materials at great expense and no proven benefit but a considerable material gain to the dentists that profit from the scare mongering.

http://www.healthiertalk.com/viewtopic.php?t=2927