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ASK THE EXPERT: How Do I Deal With
Dental Toxicity?
Dr. C. Patrick Patton, D.C. answers
some common questions
How can you help people who have problems with mercury
amalgams in their mouths?
From a physician’s perspective, the challenge for me, when
I’m working with a patient who has mercury problems, is
to figure out what way mercury is affecting them. Is it just a
straight toxicity thing or is the mercury breaking down? Even
though the American Dental Association says that you should replace
all your amalgams within seven to ten years, they’ve done
research that shows that in as little as five to seven years half
the mercury in the filling in a person’s mouth is gone.
It has half the mercury it used to, but where did that other half
of the mercury go? It goes into the tissues. Mercury’s attracted
to sulphur, to what we call sulph-hydral groups, and so there
are certain parts of the body that mercury’s attracted to
because it will combine with those particular elements. Sulph-hydral
groups include brain tissue, myalin tissue, blood marrow, ovaries,
etc. Unlike most other metals, mercury, and lead, too, will jump
out of the bloodstream and attach to parts of the body and it
will be stored there.
A little bit is stored in the body at first, then over time, more
and more keeps being stored, and the American Dental Association
says there’s not enough mercury released to cause a problem.
Well, there’s not in a day’s time for most people,
but in twenty years time or thirty years time… We breath
it in, we swallow it, it’s in the gums, it’s transported
in the bloodstream. So, over a period of time a person can develop
a toxicity to the mercury.
Are some people more allergic to it?
Yes. Often, that depends on exposure, how much they had in their
mouth, whether or not they’ve been exposed to more mercury
in their jobs or hobbies. People who live in Florida may be a
little more susceptible because when they usually use a mercury
compound when they spray for mosquitoes down there. It’s
often difficult to tell why some people are more sensitive than
others.
If it’s just a toxicity issue, where mercury is in the tissues,
there are certain things that you can take that will pull the
mercury out, chelate it, and allow the liver to dump it out into
the intestines. Most of the mercury in the body—eighty percent
of it—is taken out through the liver and intestines and
twenty percent or so will be taken out through the kidneys. There
are many formulas available to aid in detoxification of mercury.
There’s a prescription called DMPS—most of the time
it’s administered in injections—that you have to be
really careful with. In some people, it works really well, and
in some people, it mobilizes mercury and makes them sicker.
Do many doctors use DMPS?
There’s one way to find out if there is mercury in your
body, and that is to take a urine sample and measure the amount
of mercury and then have the DMPS injection, and within 24 hours,
take it again. And generally, because DMPS mobilizes mercury,
pulls it out of the tissues, you will have more in the urine,
and that way you can test it. These tests are not entirely accurate,
though. I’ve seen people who test with this method that
they have no mercury problem, and they actually do, it just wasn’t
coming out in their urine as much. Each person is different.
I don’t use DMPS, because it requires a prescription. Sometimes,
I use DMSA, which the patient takes orally and is very similar
to DMPS. It’s very high in sulphur. About one out of 100
patients that I come in contact with can handle that; for the
others, it mobilizes the mercury too quickly, and can cause a
reaction.
What supplements do you usually give your patients for
mercury detoxification?
I’ve tested a lot of different formulas that are out there,
and I’ve found a combination of supplements that I find
works most effectively. The first supplement is a combination
of free form amino acids, which contain natural sulphur. It’s
important to use free-form aminos. I also use N-Acetyl-Cysteine
(NAC). When you open up a bottle of NAC, you smell sulphur. As
I mentioned before, mercury bonds to sulphur compounds, and so
these supplements can actually pull the mercury out of a patient’s
tissues. I also give the patient some form of silymarin, or milk
thistle. That’s really specific for metal and chemical pathways
in the liver. And, of course, good old Vitamin C. I like to use
the buffered form; it’s gentler on the digestive tract,
and the patient usually can handle more. I also use Rumex crispus,
or yellow dock, which is more for the other metals that compose
the amalgam, the copper, silver, tin, zinc; it’s a blood
purifier. The theory about how all this works is the free-form
amino acids actually draw the mercury out of tissues and hold
it. Free-form amino acids can go anywhere in the body, including
the brain. The high doses of Vitamin C chelate it; in other words,
keep it from jumping back into the tissues. In a sense, it holds
it together until it gets to the liver, and then that’s
where the N-acetyl-cysteine and the silymarin do their job of
keeping it bound up and having it go through the pathways. Often,
people will get fillings worked on and will be exposed to mercury
in the process, and it just goes right to the liver and clogs
it up, and then they start getting symptoms. So the first step
is to capture the mercury in the bloodstream, then you need to
get it out of the liver into the intestinal tract to leave the
body. The yellow dock assists in the process, and helps pull the
other amalgam metals out.
Now, I want to qualify that this program works on people with
mercury toxicity. There are other things that mercury can create
in the body that those supplements may not help. It gets really
complicated when people have mercury and other metals in the mouth.
What other metals do dentists use?
They use non-precious or semiprecious metals, and sometimes they
still use precious metals, gold and platinum, but you have to
request those. Generally precious metals are better because they
don’t rust or break down as easily. The less precious a
metal is, the more easily it deteriorates; an example is iron,
which oxidizes and rusts relatively quickly. Oxidation can take
place in the mouth because of the moisture there. Saliva is acidic,
and it will start breaking any metal down.
Typically, what dental labs use to make crowns and bridges is
nickel. It’s interesting, the EPA has banned nickel in a
lot of industries because of its cancer-causing potential. They
had to stop using nickel in solders and in other applications
because of its toxicity. And yet, a dentist can put it in your
mouth. Usually, beryllium is mixed with the nickel in dental applications,
and that is an extremely toxic metal, but they add only a small
amount. To me, the nickel beryllium chromium crowns are the worst
type. A person’s gums will be perfect except where there’s
a nickel beryllium crown, and then they will be all inflamed and
reduced. Dentistry is well aware of the sensitivity people can
get to nickel crowns. After that the most common crown usually
involves mixtures of other metals, but the main metal in it is
called palladium. Palladium is a semiprecious metal. It’s
not as reactive as nickel, and yet it’s a heavy metal. Some
people can still get allergic to palladium, and once your allergic,
it doesn’t really matter what metal it is—you have
an allergy. Also, many dental materials have aluminum and barium
in them, and that’s often a problem. Many composites on
the market have that combination, so people get their mercury
fillings removed, but they’re replaced with aluminum barium
ones.
Root canals can also be a problem with metal toxicity. Typically,
what dentists use is a material called gutte percha, which is
a tree resin, but it’s wrapped in aluminum and barium. There’s
an alternative to gutte percha called Bio-calex®.
So, can I just go to a dentist and ask them to remove
my mercury?
If you’re not very specific, there’s no guarantee
that what the amalgams are replaced with will be much better.
That’s the part where the confusion lies, even in alternative
dentistry. In my experience, there is only one composite being
made right now that doesn’t have aluminum and barium in
it. I’m not saying everybody is allergic to aluminum and
barium, but if you’re going through all the trouble to get
metal removed from your mouth, why would you want to put more
back in? It’s amazing to me that dentists forget their chemistry.
Aluminum and barium are metals, and they use barium for diagnostic
purposes because it shows up white on an x-ray. It’s a metal.
It’s in the same family of metals as lead, mercury and all
those on the periodic chart.
I only know of one composite material and that doesn’t have
aluminum-barium in it. It’s called Diamond Lite. I’m
not saying that people shouldn’t be checked for biocompatibility
with Diamond Lite, but my experience has been that even my most
chemically sensitive patients are able to handle it, and it doesn’t
have aluminum barium or a chemical called phenol in it. Phenol/bisphenol
is in a lot of dental product materials, and that can cause reactions.
What issues can mercury create, other than toxicity?
The protocol I’ve discussed so far deals with mercury toxicity,
but having metals in your mouth can create other physiological
issues that taking those supplements won’t work on. Sometimes
I see that people have developed severe allergy to the metals
in their mouth—to the mercury or nickel, etc.—so they
have an allergic response in terms of extra histamine production,
white blood cell count, and so on. So it’s not really toxicity
that they’re experiencing, it’s an allergic reaction.
Toxicity means that you’ve reached a level in your body
that it can no longer hold, and it does what’s called cascading.
In other words, a person’s body has more mercury than it
can and you get specific symptoms with that.
It’s often difficult to delineate between toxicity and allergies.
Generally, mercury toxicity can cause neuropathies, numbness and
tingling, depression, vivid dreams or nightmares, and inability
to sleep. Patients often require sleep aids and antidepressants
when there’s mercury toxicity going on; they experience
flu-like symptoms. If I give a patient with toxicity the protocol
discussed earlier—free-form aminos, NAC, yellow dock, silymarin,
Vitamin C—it will help them immediately.
On the other hand, the patient can have an allergy response, like
chronic sinus problems, chronic digestion, fatigue, and exhaustion.
That patient won’t necessarily respond to the detox protocol.
When I discover the patient is at that stage, the only thing we
can do is have the dental materials that are causing the allergy
removed. Until removal, we can support their allergy response
with different supplements, depending on the patient. I have an
interesting patient now. This lady is in her 60’s, and she
has painful arthritis; she aches all over. She still works, but
she’s in immense pain. After working with her a little while,
I realized we were not making much headway with straight supplementation.
So, I sent her to Dr. Nabors, a dentist I work with, and he sent
me a report back that showed that she had 21 or 22 teeth with
nickel crowns in them and mercury under just about every one of
them. It’s a fairly common practice for dentists to use
mercury amalgam as a build-up material like that, and using mercury
that way is even worse than putting in a filling because they’re
using it to replace the tooth that has been ground away. So when
the first bridge came out of her mouth, she immediately got relief
from her arthritis symptoms…with just one bridge! She was
experiencing more of an allergy response than a toxicity; we tried
the mercury detoxification protocol, but it didn’t work
for her. The mercury and nickel and other metals can create an
autoimmune response—the body reacts to itself—which
is what arthritis is all about. That’s why mercury is suspected
in things like Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease,
and Alzheimer’s, among other diseases.
There’s also another effect that metal in the mouth can
have, including mercury. Generally this happens when the patient’s
mouth contains more than one kind of metal—mercury and nickel,
for instance. It’s called the galvanic response or battery
effect. It’s similar to the allergic response but, typically,
what happens is that you have two different kinds of metals in
an acid medium (saliva), and the mouth becomes a battery. Literally,
the teeth will generate electrical impulses that are measurable
with an instrument called an amalgometer, and this galvanic effect
will travel up pathways to the brain and interfere with neurotransmitter
and neuromuscular function. This can cause a broad range of symptoms;
for example, the person could be extremely cold, have low body
temperature, have spasms of the legs, have forms of dementia,
or problems with motor function. It just depends on what part
of the brain is being affected.
Symptoms can overlap in terms of galvanism, allergy, and toxicity,
and a qualified practitioner who works with metal toxicity issues
can help a patient determine the best course of treatment.
The only treatment for the galvanic response it removal of the
dental materials. Dr. Nabors has an amalgameter, and he reports
to me which teeth are giving off the highest readings.
How would I go about getting my mercury removed? What
should I look for in a dentist?
Find a dentist whose practice is mercury-free, who is genuinely
committed to proper removal and replacement, and who does it on
a daily basis. They need to use a dental dam and use high speed
suction. They need to have an understanding about aluminum and
barium, as well. Without adequate testing, there’s no way
to know that you wouldn’t have a problem with aluminum barium
composites.
If you’ve got a big amalgam that has a crack in it, or there
are stress cracks in a tooth, or you have an amalgam that’s
turning black, you’ll probably want to get that tooth taken
care of first. If you’re not having symptoms, you’ll
need to decide how much your pocketbook can afford. I would still
recommend taking it very slow. I would have a person do two to
four teeth a year, if they’re just dealing with amalgam.
We divide the mouth into quadrants—upper right, lower left,
etc.—and often we’ll try to remove and replace the
materials in one quadrant to free that quadrant, depending on
the situation.
So the order of removal is important?
It depends, again, on symptomatology. If a person has many symptoms,
especially a lot of neurological symptoms, they really need to
be working with a physician that is well-versed in this process.
No matter how careful any dentist is, a patient is going to be
exposed to mercury at some level. In other words, during the process,
you’re going to absorb a lot of mercury at once. And the
other thing for a chemically sensitive person or a person with
autoimmune disease ro realize is that every time you go to the
dentist for removals, they give you shots of lidocaine anesthetic,
and many people react to the anesthetic, especially if it has
epinephrine in it. The removal of the dental material—especially
when you’re taking out crowns or some large amount of material—is
a form of duress on the body. Teeth are living, vital parts of
the body, and sometimes just the assault on the teeth can affect
the related meridian and affect the patient. It’s not something
to take lightly if you have lots of problems like autoimmune diseases
or allergies. In those situations, you should definitely work
with a physician.
How do acupuncture meridians relate to teeth?
Chinese medicine teaches that the body has a life force or energy
called Chi, and that Chi is divided into fourteen different components.
Each component corresponds to a different organ or organ function
in the body, and the energy flow of that component through the
body is called a meridian. All the meridians together compose
the body’s energy system. Their belief is that any disease
process is either too much energy or not enough energy going to
an organ, and they can stick metal needles in specific parts on
that meridian to either speed up the flow or slow it down, depending
on what’s required.
All of the meridians run through the teeth; each tooth is on a
specific meridian, and putting metal in a tooth has the potential
of disrupting the energy flow to that meridian and creating a
chronic issue. It’s outside the scope of this article, but
I want to mention that sometimes people have their amalgams removed
and they don’t make a lot of progress because they have
a hidden infection in their teeth that they’re not aware
of. Infections or metal in the teeth both can disturb a meridian
and its related organs.
So, if I’m in good health, with relatively few to
no symptoms, should I just leave my mercury amalgams in my mouth?
I believe any mercury in the mouth is a time bomb, and if it’s
not affecting you now, sometime down the road it could. Later
on, if a person keeps their fillings, they end up at the dentist,
and traditional dentistry takes out the mercury and then puts
in nickel. That changes the whole dynamics in the mouth, and the
body goes through changes. I have patients who can trace their
symptoms back to when they had the first crown put in their mouth.
All they had was amalgams, and they didn’t have any problems,
then they had that first crown put in and the problems began.
The battery/galvanic effect or allergy seemed to surface then.
Most people have had just a few amalgams put in over time. There
are cases where people had six or seven done, but generally speaking,
you go to the dentist, he finds a cavity, and he puts a little
bit of mercury in it. When you have a crown put in, you’re
talking about a big wad of metal, and if somebody already has
a tendency towards allergies because of the mercury already in
their mouth, the nickel crown can create more of a response from
the body. Sometimes people also trace their problems back to an
infected tooth and then a root canal.
Recommended Reading
Whole Body Dentistry, by Mark A. Breiner, DDS, 1999,
Quantum Health Press; ISBN: 0967844304
Mercury in Your Mouth, by Quicksilver Associates, 1997,
Quicksilver Pr; ISBN: 096438700X
It’s All in your Head, by Hal A. Huggins, DDS,
1994, Avery Pub Group; ISBN: 0895295504
Dr. Patrick Patton is a chiropractor
in Asheville who has been in practice for the past 22 years. He
works with patients experiencing chronic allergies, food sensitivities,
and dental toxicity issues.
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