Mercury is one of the most toxic elements and a persistent
traveler through our environment.
So who's the travel agent for this elemental poison?
Coal-fired power plants?
Most definitely.
Mining operations?
Of course.
Your neighborhood dental office?
Surprisingly, yes.
Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing
but the truth so help you God?
Is mercury toxic?
Elemental mercury is toxic.
Silver amalgam fillings, does it contain mercury?
It does.
Almost up to 50%?
Yes.
Mercury is a toxic substance.
If you're exposed to mercury, we start seeing much more
serious health effects.
These health effects would be...
Chronic fatigue.
Double vision.
Couldn't sleep.
Depression.
Panic attacks.
Memory loss.
A lowered immune system.
Loss of vision.
Chronic headaches.
Is both an immediate problem in some individuals,
and a very long term problem in others.
I started having neurological symptoms.
I didn't feel like a human being.
In the deepest part of myself, I thought I was dying.
People think you're crazy, and you're not crazy.
You have mercury poisoning.
Why is it that the ADA will not tell the public that
mercury amalgam is harmful?
Frankly, the American Dental Association welcomed new looks
at all of the dental restorative materials.
The American people are being overtly lied to by the American.
Dental Association and the dental branch of the Food,
Drug Administration.
4, 3, 2, 1.
You're watching Fox 17 News at 9:00.
Three years ago, I was diagnosed with multiple
sclerosis, a debilitating disease that scared me
to death.
But I stand before you tonight not for pity,
but to share my hope that I believe
could help hundreds of thousands of other sick people like me
in "My Journey to MS and Back."
My aspiration was to be a journalist
and tell stories that affect change,
and tell stories that help people,
and tell stories that right wrongs,
and expose things that need a light shined on them.
I'd just left my dream job with "CBS News"
as a national correspondent.
My husband had just left his career.
And we made those two decisions based on the kind
of parents we wanted to be.
We wanted to be engaged parents.
We wanted to be active parents.
We wanted to be full-on, hands-on, 24/7 parents.
We're very much an outdoorsy family, love nature.
And I run or do some type of exercise,
workout five days a week.
No issues with my energy level at all, I mean just felt great.
I mean, I felt great.
Typical day, taking care of my kids and working,
and basically just focusing on my family.
Yeah, life was good until the day I had the dental work done.
The thing about mercury is it looks cool, but it's not.
It's really poisonous.
When you mess with mercury, it gets
in your clothes, your games, your stuff, your furniture,
your house, until everything it touches is trashed.
Elemental mercury is toxic primarily through inhalation
exposure.
And people just don't realize how dangerous it is.
But it is very important to recognize
that you can't see it, you can't smell it,
and there's no way to know that it's there, except that we know
that it volatilizes into air.
And you'll see it in literature all the time,
it will volatilize at room temperature and higher.
That's a very bad misconception people have.
It will volatilize at anything above negative 38 degrees.
The higher the temperature, the more readily it
will volatilize, the quicker it will be volatilize.
When a woman is pregnant, we hope that she's never exposed
to mercury vapor, because we know that it can pass
the placenta and cause neurological problems
in the unborn baby.
And if we see residences or buildings that
have 10 micrograms per cubic meter or more of mercury,
then we consider that it poses a health risk.
And we recommend that people don't
stay in the building or the residence.
10 micrograms is generally considered inhabitable without
some kind of respiratory protection.
Two schools will be closed tomorrow after a custodian
finds a small amount of mercury on the floor of a room
at Picklin Mills High School.
Now, how much mercury are we talking about?
Not very much.
About the amount the size of the eraser on this pencil.
But school officials explained to us,
it would only take the amount of mercury
about the size of the sharpened end of this pencil
to contaminate the entire building.
They'll evacuate a public building for a broken
thermometer.
But each one of your amalgam fillings
contains roughly the same amount of mercury.
I had one tooth hurting.
So when I went to the dentist and he looked at my mouth
and looked at the one tooth, but she's more focused on the fact
that my silver fillings are 30 years old.
And there were eight of them.
And he was telling me that I needed
to get all of these silver fillings out
and I needed to get them replaced.
And I kept saying, well, this is the only tooth
that's hurting, just this one.
Can we just replace that one?
And I let him talk me into replacing
all the silver fillings on the right side.
When it came time to refill them, he said,
what do you want in there?
Do you want amalgam, or do you want the composite,
the white version?
And I said, well, what does insurance cover?
And he said, well, insurance covers amalgam.
And the composite is a little more expensive.
And I said, well, oh well, you know,
I've had these other ones for 30 years, they work fine.
And if that's what insurance covers,
let's just get that again.
There was never a discussion about what
was in a silver filling.
I never gave it a second thought.
So I got four bright, new, shiny silver fillings
put in on the right side.
And that's when everything started.
I was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry
at the University of Kentucky.
I'd been doing mercury research since about 1985.
I came to the University of Kentucky,
and my research here led me into Alzheimer's disease.
Dr. Markesbery had found elevated mercury
in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.
So I did a set of studies showing what
heavy metals would do this.
And mercury was one of them I put in.
And at that time, I had no concern
about amalgam fillings, anything regarding mercury toxicity.
And the results were dramatic.
Phenomenal data that came out was
that mercury and only mercury would
cause the same biochemical abnormalities
as you saw in Alzheimer's disease
using our technology for evaluating
the activity of certain enzymes.
And then all of a sudden, the problem changed.
It was no longer a scientific problem that I ran into.
That was easy.
I mean, I could do that.
The problem was political.
When I tried to get funded to look at mercury as a neurotoxin
and its possibilities of contributing to Alzheimer's
disease, they shut me down.
My grants were just totally rejected.
And they said something to the effect.
Doc Haley has to realize we don't
need to see any more of these kinds of studies.
And since that time, I have never gotten another NIH grant.
And that was soul destroying.
I had been funded for 20 some years of doing research.
Then all of a sudden, I couldn't get a grant.
I had no money to run my laboratories.
And I felt like I just walked off a cliff
and was hanging onto that last branch.
And I was devastated.
And Sandy helped me through that.
When I first wrote in those grants,
I remember talking to Sandy about how important I
thought they were.
Sandy is a good sounding board, gives good advice.
And she helped me accept the fact that my ideas were not
going to be accepted by the current medical establishment.
My name is Karen Burns.
I was a dental assistant for 24 years.
I got a lot of name tags here.
Time for my biannual dental appointment.
Hopefully, I'll have no cavities.
Going to Dr. Goldberg's office.
Dr. Goldberg is the dentist that I
worked for, I would say, about seven years, my last job
that I had before I got sick.
And luckily, even though we don't agree on the issue,
we've maintained a friendship.
And I go to the office parties and going to lunch with them
after my cleaning today.
So it was a good way to wrap up my dental career.
From his education and knowledge,
he has a difference of opinion about what made me sick.
But he doesn't say that I'm not sick.
And he respects me.
And he even respects, I believe, my activism that I'm doing.
And I tell him all the time, I'm doing it
for him and the girls in the office to make them safe.
So it's all good.
Hey, Darlene.
How are you?
Hello.
How're you doing?
Haven't seen you in a long time.
Six month.
Long.
My name is Dr. Richard Evan Goldberg.
I am a practicing general dentist
in Monroe Township, New Jersey.
I met Karen the year 2000.
She came to me as a dental assistant with experience.
I hired her.
She proved herself to be a fun, vivacious, energetic character
and a good dental assistant.
Now.
Hi, Dr. Goldberg.
Good to see you.
How are you?
Good.
Nice to see you.
How is everything?
Everything's good.
How are the boys?
The boys are excellent.
She worked with me for a few years.
And then at some point, she physically
became unwell to the point where she could no longer work.
She felt fairly early on that her medical condition
was as a result to her exposure of mercury and amalgam.
All right, guys.
Say hello to everybody, OK?
Yeah, thank you.
You're welcome.
You're doing great.
OK.
I'll see you later?
All right.
If you have any problems, give me a buzz.
OK.
Discussion about dental amalgams and its safety have
gone back before I went to school.
Big concern, obviously, is mercury and the mercury coming
from dental amalgams, and whether or not
it has some kind of negative effect on individuals
and to what degree can you measure it,
and whether or not it is to such a degree
that it makes the material unsafe for usage in people.
In the early 1800s, organized dentistry was still in its
infancy.
As there were no dental schools or licensing boards,
it was common that craftsmen, such as the local barber
or blacksmith might also practice dentistry, which
at the time amounted to little more than having teeth pulled
or gold fillings placed in cavities.
Dental mercury's introduction to the United States
came in 1833 by the Crawcour brothers of France.
They called it Royal Mineral Succedaneum, a handmade mixture
of melted silver coin shavings and elemental mercury.
The lower cost of this combination
of mercury with another metal, otherwise known as an amalgam,
enabled a larger portion of the population
to afford the services of those dentists who
used amalgam fillings.
But a bitter controversy started brewing over the use of mercury
as a restorative material.
And by 1843, the world's first national dental organization,
the American Society of Dental Surgeons,
passed a resolution stating that the use of amalgam
was considered to be malpractice.
The American Society of Dental Surgeons
asked members to sign a pledge never
to place what the organization referred to
as poison metal fillings.
And those members who did use amalgam risked being expelled.
And by 1856, the American Society of Dental Surgeons
disbanded due to loss of membership.
In its place rose the American Dental Association in 1859,
which to this day continues to promote
the safety of mercury fillings.
Shortly after I had the dental work done,
I had this heavy metal taste in my mouth.
And it was all day, every day.
It was gross.
And so I started buying a lot of gum and chewing gum
all the time, trying to mask the taste or make it go away.
Then a few weeks, I started noticing
some weird neurological sensations.
I started having what I would describe as like pin
prick feeling.
And I had the sensation of cool water rushing down
the back of my head and down my back.
And I kept just sort of passing it off
as something fleeting that would go away.
But it kept building, the symptoms kept building.
And then it affected my vision.
And I had blurred vision in one eye.
And then I had this weird ringing in my ear.
I would be in a conversation with someone,
and there's like this, in my ear,
while I'm trying to talk to someone.
And the biggest effect was these deep, deep headaches.
And they were so deep, I mean, deep, deep down in my...
Like in my brain.
But when I would go to the doctor,
and they would tell me all of these possibilities of what
it could be, then that would kind of make me feel,
OK, this is probably in my head.
It's probably a culmination of all those things together.
And I'm going to be fine.
And I'm going to ignore this.
So I would just go on about my business and think,
OK, they're right, they're right, they're right,
and I'm wrong.
This must be in my head.
It was in my head.
It was in my teeth.
So I kept believing them, letting
it get worse and worse and worse,
until the day when I woke up and couldn't walk.
The first time I saw Sandy was she was walking down
the farm lanes, and she would walk up and get on the same
school bus I was riding on.
She's the first girl I ever dated.
When I was about a junior in high school,
I asked her on a hayride.
When I came back from out of the Army, she picked me up.
We were sitting in her car.
But I asked her to marry me.
And I told her what my goal was, was
to go get a PhD in chemistry and it
was going to be tough for about four or five years,
because you're not going to make a lot of money.
Well, it's been very important to both Boyd and I
to stay balanced.
And we both love nature.
We both love animals.
So this is a perfect place for us.
It's our refuge against the stresses of life.
So we love it here.
For over 20 years, Boyd has committed himself
to educating people about the dangers of mercury exposure.
He has traveled all over the world.
Sometimes, he's gone once a month.
So it's a considerable amount of time.
He has sacrificed a lot in the way of time, energy, and money.
He doesn't do this for monetary reasons.
He does it 'cause he's so passionate and committed
to the cause.
It takes a very courageous person
to be truthful and speak honestly as he has.
I admire him for that.
But since 1991, I've been giving talks all over
the world.
I was averaging over 30 trips a year.
And I testified in front of Congress.
I've gone to Europe many, many times.
And that's not an easy trip for an older person like me.
It takes a lot of starch out of you.
The organization that actually introduced me to the concept
that dental amalgams were releasing
toxic amounts of mercury is The International Academy
of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, because they
thought it was causing a lot of medical damage.
And they were right.
I mean, I agree with them now.
I didn't at the time.
I thought that the FDA nor the ADA
would allow anyone to put something
in the mouths of citizens that released so much mercury vapor
and not have tested it.
I've given up a huge number of my weekends with my family
to go to meetings, because this is a message that
has to get out, that the amalgams are toxic to people
and are causing a lot of problems.
I don't see my family as much as I used to.
They live here in Staten Island.
I live in New Jersey.
Like my husband said, you know, most people
don't know about mercury poisoning.
They don't know anyone else with mercury poisoning.
They don't read about it in the news.
They don't hear about it.
So even though I have it, they don't really understand.
Because they assume... they see me, I'm on my feet
and everything is fine.
It's kind of like they forget that I'm sick.
And I don't want to be sick.
FDA says it's safe.
The ADA really says it's safe.
So they don't understand how I could be sick from it
and nobody else is.
Amalgams or silver fillings have been used for over 150
years.
Some critics have claimed that amalgams are unsafe.
This is not true.
You can't install a mercury-releasing product
into someone's mouth 2 inches from their brain and expect not
to see some repercussions.
Amalgam fillings contain roughly 50%
elemental mercury, which releases
mercury vapor that is 100 to 600 times
higher than what the FDA estimates.
The science tells us that 80% of the mercury
vapor we breathe accumulates in our bodies very quickly.
But a good portion end up in our brains.
There are vapors, mercury vapors,
that are emitted from dental amalgam during the mixing
process, during the placement process.
There is no evidence that at this point
that the mercury vapors, say that were emitted, are harmful.
And I woke up the next morning, and I got out of bed,
and I was walking sort of like this.
And I had to reach for the door facing.
And I... as hard as I tried to get my brain
to tell my legs to walk straight,
I couldn't make them work.
It was beyond frightening.
I didn't know if I'd had a stroke overnight.
I just couldn't figure out what was going on.
And I called my husband, and I said, honey, I can't walk.
I was so scared.
I was home alone, and I knew the kids were about to get up.
And I'm trying to figure out...
I'm not going to be able to care for these children.
So we went back to the doctor that day.
And the same doctor who had been telling me it
could be all these other things and same doctor this day,
after she ran a couple of tests on me,
she said just kind of in callous manner,
well, you've either got MS or a brain tumor.
So we're going to get you in for your MRI later tonight.
And we'll get right on this.
I mean, my husband I both looked at each other thinking,
did we just hear what we think we just heard.
What just happened?
I've been coming to you for three or four months telling
you something's wrong, and you're
telling me everything's fine.
And now, you tell me I have a brain tumor or MS?
From there, we went to see an MS doctor.
And he ran a bunch of tests and came back
and said, at this point, we're going
to hold off on treating you with any MS medication,
because we want to see you back in six months just
to kind of see where things are and kind of get
a better feel of how your body's going to react to this disease.
And I mean, I am in tears.
Would you please give me these MS shots,
give me something, slow this thing down?
I'm raising babies.
I need you to stop this train.
And he wouldn't give me any medicine.
And now looking back, that was basically the hand of God just
interceding right at that moment and saying,
just hold on, hold on, just wait, there's something better.
I'm Dr. Matthew Young.
I'm a general dentist here in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
I've been here at this location for 29 years.
I was a traditional dentist for about 10 or 12 years
and then found out about the dangers of mercury
and other dental materials.
So we became mercury-free, not putting in any mercury amalgam
fillings.
And then when I discovered The International Academy
of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, then I became mercury-safe.
What that means is we use special protective engineering
controls for OSHA to reduce the exposure of our employees
and our patients to the mercury vapor
when the old mercury fillings are removed.
Well, we've been out here at Dr.
Young's office this week installing a multipoint mercury
monitoring system that continuously and sequentially
measures from eight different sample points throughout as his
dental office.
Almost all of our other clients that deal with mercury
are required by OSHA and EPA to measure their facility
throughout the day to make sure that their employees are
below the ceiling limit, which is
100 micrograms per cubic meter.
Dr. Young has taken a major step here
by being the first dentist that I'm aware of
to install a multipoint mercury monitoring
system into his office.
He's doing everything that he can
to keep his employees and himself as well as his patients
save during normal procedures that
have to do with dental mercury amalgam fillings.
And this was what the OSHA regulation requires,
is that the dentist is aware of how much mercury is in his
office, that the employees are educated about it.
We have a heavy metal chapter in our OSHA handbook
that the employees have to read and understand.
And they have to wear special protective gear,
so it keeps off their skin.
And they're not allowed to breathe it.
And our machine keeps track of how clean the air is here
in order to stay below these dangerous levels.
And I think it's incumbent ethically upon the dentist
to be aware of those risks and to also monitor and educate
their employees every day.
I just flew in from Santiago, Chile,
where I gave a presentation to a group of legislators
and researchers down there.
And tomorrow, I give a talk to The International Academy
of Oral Medicine and Toxicology on how
mercury causes some of the biochemical abnormalities
that we see in some of the neurological diseases
such as Alzheimer's disease.
Dr. Haley is a research scientist,
an international lecturer, is a former chairman
of the department of chemistry at the University of Kentucky.
He has numerous research studies published in peer reviewed,
medical scientific journals.
Please welcome to the program Dr. Boyd Haley.
Mercury and only mercury causes the break down and deep
polymerization of tubulin off of the neurofibril,
producing neurofibrillary tangles,
which is the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.
Not only that, but published studies
repeatedly show that the widespread exposure of mercury
and its effects on the brain explains every single aspect
of Alzheimer's disease.
It is the missing piece of the puzzle
that's been literally right under the noses of researchers
for all these years.
Metal amalgams release many, many micrograms of mercury per
day into our bodies.
So you not only have a toxin that can do the effect,
you have it placed within inches of your brain.
And how do you get that across to people?
And I think I do a decent job.
But sometimes, I'm not so sure it's adequate.
And a lot of people, they want my slides.
Anybody who asked for them, have my slides.
You give my talk, I don't care.
I mean, this is not information that's secretive or anything.
It's something that should be out there for everybody to use.
Here I was with six months to do nothing but wait and get
worse.
And I thought, well, what else do I have to do
but maybe try to look into this and figure out
where all this came from.
The very next Sunday at church, a guy in our classes
said, you know, my brother treats
people who've been diagnosed with MS.
He treats them for heavy metal toxicity related
to their fillings.
He said, I don't know much about it.
But I know that he's had some success.
And there's something about there's mercury or something
in these fillings.
He said, do you have any of those?
And I said, well, yeah, I just got four new ones,
and I have four old ones on this side.
That was my first glimmer of hope, the first moment
that I had been told anything that even remotely sounded
like there might be some sort of hope out there for me.
I could not believe I didn't know that there was mercury
in these silver fillings.
I couldn't believe it.
I thought, oh, well, this has to be a lie.
I think the majority of people still
do not know what these dentists are putting in their mouth
and in the mouths of their children.
According to a 2006 nationwide Zogby poll,
76% of consumers did not know mercury was the main component
of dental amalgam fillings.
But once informed, 92% of respondents
thought their dentist should be required to inform them
about mercury and non-mercury dental fillings
prior to treatment.
The majority of dentists are not aware
that under the learned intermediary doctrine,
health care practitioners are bound
by law to pass along manufacturer warnings
to patients.
We know that's not being done.
In fact, it's worse than you think.
It's prohibited.
Regrettably, the American Dental Association has
a provision in its code of ethics to stop dentists from
initiating communications with patients about the risk
of mercury dental fillings.
This what I call gag rule has unfortunately
been enforced by many dentist-dominated state
dental boards.
Today, I'm here with the Pennsylvania Coalition
for Mercury-Free Dentistry.
And we were talking to patients going in
to get free dental care.
And we were letting them know they
were eligible to get a white filling for no extra cost.
And that would be safer for them.
A lot of the dentists that came out and dental assistants
were putting their eyes up in the air,
like they were aggravated that we would come and talk
to the patients like this.
But you know, I wish somebody told me
that I was breathing in all these toxic fumes.
I had no idea.
And these people in the school that are being trained,
they have no idea.
Well, I can't remember when I didn't enjoy fishing.
I mean, my granddad was a person who liked to fish quite a bit
and took me quite often.
It's always been a major relaxation for me.
Went to graduate school, we ate a lot
of what I either caught fishing, my wife and I,
or what I shot bird hunting with my dogs.
Catching fish was a supplement to our diet.
And since we didn't have a lot of money,
eating a fish was probably better
than a lot we could buy in the grocery store.
It's a big, big difference.
And it's kind of sad that today the kids are told...
Everyone's told, don't eat too many of the fish,
they're too toxic with mercury.
There are fish advisories in about almost all the water
in the United States.
I think it's sad.
Why go fish, if you can't eat the fish you're catching.
You're catching something that's toxic, why...
It just takes the romance and the livelihoodness out of it.
And I think we should do everything
we can to get our water and air clean again.
That means we have to stop all kinds of mercury.
We can't blame just one group.
And the ones that... things that you can do something about,
like dental amalgams, that should be done.
The United Nations Environment Programme reports
that 10% of global mercury usage is for amalgam tooth fillings.
This results in up to 340 tons of dental mercury
journeying into the environment each year.
In the United States, dentists are currently the largest users
of elemental mercury.
This accounts for roughly 32 tons of mercury used yearly
to place amalgam restorations, otherwise known
as silver fillings.
Although the number of amalgams placed
has decreased over the last few decades,
dentists still use amalgam without precautions.
So the threat of mercury exposure continues.
Tonight, I continue my story with a comprehensive look
at efforts to ban silver fillings across the world.
This year, the US State Department
proclaimed we should phase down the use of mercury amalgam
fillings during international treaty talks at the United.
Nations.
But the mercury treaty, as it's called,
which would affect every dentist in the world,
is not a done deal yet.
Whether or not I believe that the minute amounts of inert
dental amalgam that might go down into a system really will
affect the water supplies of a community,
I haven't seen any evidence to suggest it,
I'm always open to changing my mind.
Because of the United Nations mercury treaty recognizing
dentistry as a significant contributor to environmental
mercury exposure, the EPA is considering regulations that
would require all dentists to install equipment that would
capture the dental mercury before it reaches
the environment.
For over 75 years, consumers and dental professionals have
looked for the American Dental Association seal of acceptance
on products.
The ADA seal stands for quality and effectiveness.
Manufacturers who apply for the seal
must meet certain criteria.
They must provide objective data supporting the product safety.
You've never done any safety studies on this product.
I'm the former consumer representative on the Dental.
Products Panel at the FDA.
If amalgam is taken to a class III by the FDA,
class III would require manufacturers to prove safety,
which they never had to do.
They're not going to spend the millions of dollars to try
to prove that mercury is safe when everyone knows it isn't.
All product claims made on packaging and labeling are
approved by the ADA.
So you can trust them.
My name's Christopher Shade.
I have a PhD in environmental and analytical chemistry
of mercury.
I developed a new testing technology
for separating different forms of mercury.
We use that now in clinical testing
to look at how different forms of mercury go into the body
and build up in different reservoirs
and how they come out.
We've run about 20,000 tests now.
And unfortunately, most mainstream dentists
don't come to me to look for testing.
They're taught that there is no mercury exposure.
And so the only guys that I look at
are the mercury-free dentists, which means
they're only removing amalgam.
They're not placing it.
And they even stick out from the regular population
as having higher mercury levels.
So if these guys, who are taking every step they
can to lower all of their occupational exposure,
just imagine what the dentists who take no precautions look
like.
I had a regular life.
Everything was going good.
And when my daughter was about two years old,
I started to get sicker and sicker.
I finally went to a holistic doctor.
And they asked what I did for a living.
And I said I was a dental assistant.
A dental assistant has the potential to have a very high
amount of mercury in the brain.
Neurological symptoms happen to be the most dominant symptom
in the constellation of problems that mercury can create.
Well, I've been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and chronic
fatigue.
So they tested my hair and my urine
and found out that I had full-blown mercury poisoning.
Karen Burns' urinary levels at the time of her sickness
were well within the range where this could be an issue.
So she had sufficient exposure to cause
serious neurological effects.
And this was causing my fatigue, and my muscle pain,
and my lowered immune system, my rashes,
the numbness in my hands and fingers and feet.
So a lot of these fatigue symptoms that come along with
the mercury exposure, along with the emotionality, are very,
very obvious repercussions of a mercury toxicity.
I worked for over 20 dentists.
None of them ever said amalgam wasn't safe.
They didn't tell anybody that there
were warnings on the labels.
We discovered that when you remove these old fillings with
the dental drill that a large vapor of mercury is exposing
the patient and the employee in the workplace.
So we put in protective engineering controls
to filter the air, filter the water,
and to reduce the patient and employees' exposure
to that toxic level of mercury.
I don't particularly have great concerns with the removal
of dental amalgams.
And like I've said to you, if something came up tomorrow
where I thought I was conv... there
was some convincing evidence that it
would show some kind of harm, of course,
then perhaps I would change.
"Barnes versus Kerr," David Barnes is a dentist
in Shelbyville, Tennessee.
He hired me, and off we went against the largest
manufacturer of dental amalgam in the country,
Kerr Corporation.
What they did was present evidence that their warning was.
Kerr's warnings are published in material safety data sheets
that they're required to distribute their product.
But the warning essentially said that mercury is a neurotoxin.
And it was at least arguable that all the things
that Kerr was warning about happened to Burns.
So Kerr's position was, this is a dangerous product.
We told you it's a dangerous product.
And the case ought to be dismissed,
because you've been adequately warned.
OK, a little history here.
When dentists go to dental school,
they're taught that mixed dental amalgam is completely inert.
And so when a dentist goes in to grind out an amalgam filling,
he is creating tremendous quantities
of mercury particulate.
The particulate is bound to the other constituents of amalgam.
But Burns was absorbing tremendous amounts, thousands
of micrograms of mercury a day, and ultimately began
to suffer a very predictable consequence.
Back to our case, Kerr tells us it's warning is adequate.
We say, no, it's not.
The vast majority of the mercury going into a system
is from this mixed dental amalgam.
And it was.
And I don't think anyone argued with that.
So is the warning adequate if it only tells them
that mercury is poisonous?
To my surprise, the district report
said, yeah, it is adequate.
The manufacturer didn't say that the poisonous mercury would
be any less poisonous when mixed with the other dental amalgam
constituents.
The appellate court in a published opinion
also felt that the adequacy of the warning
was such that Burns was or should have been aware
that mixed dental amalgam was completely poisonous.
I had been pushed by the FDA, American Dental Association
as somebody that's on the lunatic fringe.
And what's lunatic about, the fact
that somebody is putting a most toxic metal known
to man in your mouth, and I'm saying,
hey, we really need to look at this.
This may be the cause of Alzheimer's disease.
We have to do something.
We have to come up with something that's very dramatic.
I am going to visualize the mercury vapor rolling off
of these amalgams when you put a drill on them
or when you abrade them in any way.
This will leave no doubt in people's mind
that there's a lot of mercury coming out of dental amalgams,
when you put them in, when you take them out.
I'm very optimistic this may change
the entire attitude of the American Dental Association.
Dr. Boyd Haley coming from University of Kentucky up
at Lexington.
And he's going to help us to put the box together,
where we're going to visualize the mercury vapor.
Yeah, the first smoking tooth video shows a 25-year-old
amalgam from an extract a tooth.
And they put it in front of the mercury lamp,
and you can see exactly how much mercury is vaporizing off
the filling.
When you see this for the first time, it's quite a shock
to see the amount of mercury and the volume
that your patients are either breathing or swallowing.
And from then on, I knew that I wasn't going
to place anymore amalgams.
And when I remove them, I was going to do it safely.
I just think the best thing to do
is to keep in mind that our ethical creed is to do no harm.
I think the biggest inflection from anybody
who first joins the IAOMT is you're
going to have to talk to the same patients
that you just put the mercury fillings in maybe a year ago,
two years ago, and tell them that you've learned
this new information about it.
I think you have to come to terms in your own ethics,
in your own heart as to how you're going to communicate
that and how you're going to present that
to patients without feeling like you're contradicting
your previous work.
The most beautiful part about the whole transition
is that your patient loyalty really blooms tremendously,
because it seems like the patients know more
about this than the traditional dentist do.
We're finding out that mercury's been taking out
a lot of other medicines and other industries in the world.
And it's soon going to be removed
from dentistry, according to the UN treaty in 2013, we hope.
So when the times change, it's wise to change with them.
There's a difference between someone coming in here
and being concerned about the safety of the amalgam and after
me educating a patient, who's a lay person,
who's not in the profession and may just have heard something
from a fairly uneducated journalist about this,
that I will... after that discussion,
they still feel that they would like them removed,
I might consider doing it for them.
OK, this is going to be a lot of money.
It sounds crazy, looks crazy.
And if this works, why isn't everybody doing it?
And where are we going to find the money to do this?
And what if it doesn't work and we've
poured all this money down the drain, then
what am I going to do?
And my husband and I talked about it,
prayed about it over several weeks.
And we decided that we needed to get these fillings out and just
see what happened.
And that was $10,000.
I have a real hard time with is when you have doctors
espousing removals of dental amalgams,
because they believe that some systemic illness is the cause
of it.
And within a week of getting the silver fillings out,
the mercury out of my mouth, I was 50% better.
The science is not very convincing.
It's not.
Because you can find people with these conditions
without dental amalgams in their mouths.
The dental industry promotes a stance that on its surface
seems simple and adequate.
It says that if she got sick from mercury,
then all the dental assistants would be sick for mercury,
all the dentists be sick from mercury, but they're not.
But if you really understand the complexities of biochemistry,
genetics, and genetic susceptibility,
you'd see that that's really a flawed scientific stance.
Lead will increase the toxicity of a known amount
of mercury over 100-fold.
And so when people say, well, we can look at people
and they don't have enough mercury to be mercury toxic,
well, I would say, you're not that smart.
You have to know what the lead concentration is
in that person.
Every human body has a genetic predisposition
to handle toxicity a certain way.
And that's what's so frustrating,
is they just feel like they can dismiss
all of this information, and all of these studies,
and all of the stories like mine of people being
cured because not everybody who has amalgam fillings get sick.
And there's a very strong biological reason for this.
And it comes down to the individual's susceptibility.
Most of this is genetic susceptibility.
Certain people will get sick, will have symptoms at much
lower levels of exposure than other people.
But what I personally would not do is,
if somebody came in with, say, multiple sclerosis and said I
heard that if I remove all these dental fillings my multiple
sclerosis is going to go away, I won't do that.
I will tell them that I do not believe that that
is the science at all.
I'm not convinced of it and that I would perhaps
be doing more harm to them than good in trying
to remove these things.
Dental amalgam has been used in dentistry for over 150 years
and was grandfathered into use by the Food and Drug.
Administration.
Because of this, the product was not classified.
In 1976, Congress passed a law mandating
that the FDA classify all products which had
been grandfathered into use.
After 33 years of ignoring the congressional mandate
to classify amalgam fillings, the FDA was sued.
Charlie Brown, National Council Consumers for Dental.
Choice, our mission is to ban the use of mercury-based dental
fillings known incorrectly as silver fillings.
And we sought a court order to order FDA to classify.
The judge Ellen Huvelle said that's enough.
You go into mediation.
You come back here a week from Monday.
And you tell me what date you're going to classify amalgam,
said that to FDA.
The federal government is again going to look
into the safety of the fillings that tens of millions of us
already have.
The fillings in question are the silver kind.
And the concern here is mercury, which is an ingredient.
The American Dental Association insists the fillings are safe,
but many people believe the mercury can lead
to serious health problems.
I'm going to take the dog for a walk.
OK.
Our whole lives changed because of this.
In the beginning, it was hard for him to understand this too.
And I was lucky that Nick went to a health conference
and a holistic dentist was there.
And he lectured.
And then my husband came home and took his retirement money
out, so that I could get chelation.
That was the first time that I got the chelation.
So yes, he's been really supportive,
amazingly supportive.
When you get something like this,
you just to go crawl in a hole and just say, to heck with it,
I'm out.
See ya.
I mean, I never could have made it through this without Chris.
I mean, he is so strong.
He's strong in his faith.
He's strong emotionally.
He just kept encouraging me and telling me,
it's going to be OK.
We've got such a great marriage.
I mean, she's my best friend.
It just doesn't matter.
Nothing's going to get between us, including a sickness.
I know how sick she feels, and I just try to do whatever I
can to help her.
And I think she appreciates that.
It has affected our relationship.
And our life is totally upside down.
Well, it was a good defining moment in our marriage.
Because when you get married, what are the vows, you know?
There's sickness and in health, right?
Every step of the way, it's like, it's going to be fine.
We're good.
We're together.
I'm not leaving.
I love you.
I don't care if you're in a wheelchair.
I don't care if I have to pick you up.
We're just going to pick you up and take you where we're going
I did what I had to do to be a supportive husband in every
way possible.
So it wasn't that big of a deal.
It's what I signed up for.
And it's the way it should be.
I'm glad that he had the foresight to see farther down
the road and to not be as frightened as I was.
It's brought us closer in some ways.
But there's days when, you know, it catches up to me,
catches up to her.
It's like, we all want just go to bed
and try to hope that tomorrow will be better.
But it's not always easy.
We're going to go to Walmart and pick up some material
to make a box, so we can video mercury leaving a dental
amalgam, like you would do in a general chemistry experiment.
The most uneducated person is going to look at that and say,
that is mercury vapor coming off of an amalgam that's
been in my mouth for 20 years.
This is a really inexpensive experiment
that the ADA and the FDA can do this with their lunch money.
And yet, they refuse to do it.
And they'll even make claims that what we're doing
can't be repeated.
And it's something that's done in so many general chemistry
laboratories that you can't deny what it's measuring.
Dr. Matt Young and I are going to make this box
and demonstrate this.
Hello, Matty.
Oh, hey, boy.
Good to see you again.
Glad to have you.
Thanks for coming.
Yeah.
My pleasure.
It's mercury vapor.
You can't see it in the daylight.
And if you breathe it, you can't taste it, you can't smell it.
So what we're hoping is that when
we make visuals showing this mercury vapor rolling off
of these amalgams when you put a drill on them, that the dentist
will all of a sudden, oh, my god, these guys aren't lying.
There's a lot of mercury coming off.
We can visually show it.
And this is an approach that's been developed by chemists,
who activate a mercury lamp.
A mercury lamp is a lamp that contains mercury vapor
that you run a current through.
And that mercury emits a light of a special wavelength
that water and air will not absorb.
However, if you place in front of that lamp
an amalgam in a tooth and you activate that tooth
by brushing it, then millions and millions
of atoms of mercury come off of that tooth.
When the atom of mercury gets in between the screen
and the lamp, it absorbs that photon and blocks that light.
And it looks like there is a shadow made
on the screen where the mercury is absorbing the light.
So what you're seeing is really an absorbance
of the photon by the mercury atom
that reflects as a shadow on the screen.
In addition, there's a lot of skeptics out there that think
this is water vapor coming off the teeth and not actually
mercury.
We want to prove once and for all
that it's actually mercury vapor that's coming off.
We also have a hole in the top of the box with which we
will insert our probe.
And this is going to go to the mercury 3,000
mass spectrophotometer.
And this is going to go into the top of the box
like this, so that a sample of the air during these procedures
can be measured accurately.
Are you prepared to take the oath, Senator?
I am.
I, Barack Hussein Obama do solemnly swear...
I will not back down from protecting our kids
from mercury poisoning.
While the FDA was working on the classification,
newly elected President Obama had nominated Dr.
Margaret Hamburg to be commissioner of the FDA.
It is a privilege to be here today to discuss my nomination
as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
To me, this means operating an agency that
is accessible and transparent.
The FDA has responsibility to ensure that its work is given
by the best possible science and is undertaken with integrity,
openness, and credibility.
I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have.
Senator Enzi is going to...
During her confirmation hearing,
she was asked of her position on dental amalgam.
She's asked about the rule in the Senate confirmation.
She should have said, I'm recused from that rule.
Instead she didn't.
Dr. Hamburg failed to disclose to Senator Enzi that
she was a board member of Henry Schein,
the largest distributor of amalgam in the US.
After her appointment was confirmed,
Dr. Hamburg inherited the oversight of the amalgam rule
already in progress at the FDA.
Hamburg had a conflict that should have resulted in her
dismissal as commissioner.
They made her sign an ethics contract that said,
I will not participate in any matter affecting
Henry Schein as long as I own the stock or stock options.
So she checked the price of her stock options
a day before the meeting that she knew
was being held, July 1.
She had the meeting to discuss the amalgam rule with Susan.
Runner and other top FDA staff.
She went ahead and worked on the Henry Schein rule
while she owned the stock options.
In mid July, she said, OK, I'll recuse myself
for ethical reasons.
She will not disclose how she recused herself,
when she recused herself, whether she recused herself.
We take their word for it.
You understand, a recusal is normally a written phenomenon.
The judge says, I'm off this case.
The commissioner says, I'm off this case.
She never wrote down anything.
Hamburg in the final weeks before the rule,
wrote Henry Schein's lawyer and said,
I want to unrecuse myself.
Will you take back the stock options?
I want to get back in and regulate for you.
I want to regulate for you.
I want it in my recusal of anything affecting you,
so I can go back, take my stock options back.
And the guy was happy to do it.
I knew from my research that getting the fillings out alone
was not enough, because the mercury from the fillings is
stored in your tissue.
And it particularly likes the central nervous system.
So I knew that I needed to take that next step in trying
to decide, do I really need to get chelation?
And if so, how do I go about this?
And I never would have figured all of this out
if it weren't for God's guiding hand.
I never will forget, one day I was at the Y.
And I'd finished my workout, and I'm just praying and meditating
it.
I'm just saying, you know, God, if I'm not supposed to do this,
just let me know.
I mean, I'm already better without these fillings in.
I can already feel my body's calm down.
It's not as agitated.
And I'm not twitching as much.
But I'm good, I can live with what I've got.
And if I'm not supposed to do anything else,
if I'm not supposed to go get chelation or pursue
any other experimental treatments, I'm good.
Just let me know.
Give me a sign.
Just give me a sign that I'm on the right track.
And at the place where I work out,
they have a basket of Bible verses as you walk out.
And they call it the spiritual vitamin.
And I grabbed one on the way out that day.
And it said, you will know the truth.
The truth will set you free.
And I knew.
These treatments were IV treatments.
And I did it for a couple of years.
And then my veins collapsed.
I had no veins left.
I couldn't do it anymore.
So even if I had the money, I don't even
know if I could get chelation at this stage of the game.
If you've had a bad amalgam removal or a period where you
had high mercury exposure, often long after that mercury you are
exposed to is gone, the damage from that remains.
I don't know what to say, what to do.
I mean, this has been a long haul.
I've been sick now for 15 years.
There's so many days out of year that I can't even
get out of bed.
You know, every day, you wake up and you
feel like you have the flu, flu-like symptoms.
And you're just sick as a dog.
And you push yourself, push yourself,
push yourself, because you want to maintain
what little life you can.
My big concern was A, for her health, but, B,
also for whether or not she was going down a rabbit's hole with
no end.
And that's... I may still feel that way to some degree.
I don't see in my lifetime it ever getting straightened out
and people ever believing what happened to me.
A recent study by the Food and Drug Administration found
no valid evidence that amalgams are unsafe.
That's great news for patients and dentists alike.
The International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology,
a scientific organization made up of dental, medical,
and research professionals, immediately started combing
through the new rule and found many glaring errors,
all in favor of the safety of amalgam.
The petition for reconsideration challenged
the FDA final rule on regulatory grounds and scientific grounds.
We found 27 propositions of error,
and I mean big errors, in the FDA's final rule.
The public doesn't know it, because public doesn't keep up
with this.
But the FDA knows it.
Amalgam somehow gets a free pass.
I don't understand it.
And I can only assume that it's political influence brought
by the FDA that's causing these aberrant results.
Not everyone agrees with the new Food and Drug.
Administration report that's out this week.
It says, silver dental fillings are safe.
In fact, an FDA...
The final rule of the classification was a huge
disappointment to health advocates,
as it declared the mercury vapor released from amalgam fillings
to be safe for anyone and everyone.
With the news that there would be
no constraints upon the product, Henry Schein's stock soared.
Hamburg writes him the day the rule comes out and says,
my friendships with Henry Schein outlasts my recusal,
my friendships outlast my recusals.
Schein's stock jumps a buck and a half.
July 30, the general counsel writes Margaret Hamburg,
we are indebted to you for your work as commissioner.
We are indebted to you.
That's the kind of thing that happens in Washington that
creates in everybody's mind that we're all corrupt up here.
Well, I'm Congressman Dan Burton from the 5th district
of Indiana.
And when you find out that government officials, who
are making decisions regarding the health of the nation,
are doing questionable things, it only adds to the problem.
People should have confidence in the government
that we're trying to do the best we can for them.
And if the head of the FDA has stock
in a company that makes dental amalgams
and they're making rulings, they should be recusing themselves.
And if they don't, I think that they're
guilty of criminal activity.
And the reason I say that is because I
am convinced after having been the chairman of government
reform and oversight for six years
and had numerous hearings on the subject
that the mercury in the amalgam does cause
human neurological problems.
She should not be FDA commissioner, absolutely not.
I literally put myself in that doctor's hand and just
went with it.
I am seeing an osteopathic doctor,
began intravenous chelation of EDTA and DMPS.
It's kind of like chemotherapy.
That's what it's like.
You get an injection, you get an IV,
and you just kind of sit there for a couple of hours.
And there's this big bag of liquid
being poured into your body.
And it's frightening.
And I made it through the whole day, and I felt normal.
And then I slept great and woke up the next day,
and I thought, well, OK, I survived it.
There must be something to this.
Then I went back for my next treatment the next week.
And then I started feeling so much better.
I mean, I just had like an extra kick in my step.
I'm thinking, OK, I'm onto something here.
And each treatment just reinforced
what I had researched in.
And it may not work for everybody.
And I'm certainly not saying that it will.
And I think that there's something
to be said of starting early.
In my case, we arrested it early.
We arrested it, contained it, stopped it, and I'm good.
But there's some people who've been sick
for a long, long time.
And it's hard to reverse damage if it's
been going on for a long time.
I definitely felt vindicated.
And I think I told my husband that.
I said, oh, I feel so vindicated.
I said, now, I mean, look at me, I'm so much better
and I can't even believe it.
I feel like I'm not crazy anymore, you know?
I feel like this is valid.
This is real.
More people need to know about this.
And that's when my husband started saying,
well, you need to tell people.
He'd say, honey, you know, you sure are doing good.
You really need to tell people about this.
This morning is the open public hearing.
Could you state your name?
My name is Karen Burns.
And I was a dental assistant for 24 years,
until I couldn't work anymore.
When I first started dental assisting,
we didn't wear a mask or gloves.
We had a bottle of mercury and silver pellets
that we put together by hand.
We didn't understand that these vapors were everywhere.
You must see the damage that it's doing.
Why should anyone have to suffer this illness when
it can be totally eradicated?
I hope you people just listen and find it in your heart
to really consider all of this.
It's a real thing.
Thank you.
For the most part, I generally approached it with
a skeptical eye.
And I did not do that necessarily
because of any ill will, but because sometimes if you follow
a certain orthodoxy that's wrong,
whether it be a flat Earth theory or anything else,
you're not getting to truth.
And of course, I think in the end, you're looking for truth.
We just finished constructing our visualization box,
which is made out of everyday materials that you can get
in any hardware store.
Typically in most dental schools,
it's been taught that the mercury is
trapped within the matrix of the amalgam.
And so therefore, we're trying to visualize here and prove
the fact that there is a significant amount that
comes off during the mixing, during the packing.
And then we'd have some teeth with the amalgam
that's been set for a while.
And we're going to be removing that
with a high-speed dental drill in order
to visualize how much vapor comes off during that procedure
as well.
The American Dental Association has made
the argument that mercury is fixed in the amalgam fillings
and it doesn't come out easily.
And what this research that we're doing here visually shows
is that, when you drill on an amalgam filling,
that it dramatically exposes the patient, and the dentist,
and the dental technician to huge amounts of mercury vapor
that enters the body.
It's even worse than what they imagined.
2,483 micrograms per cubic meter,
and I've never seen levels of mercury this high.
That's pretty much unheard of in any type of work environment.
Because it definitely shows with just absolute fact,
hard science that amalgams when they are heated with the drill
by drilling on them release copious amounts of mercury,
of vapor into the air.
Clearly, if you're not measuring it,
you're not monitoring it, and you're not educating these
employees, then the OSHA regulations are not being
upheld.
And so I just ask the ADA, don't you care about your own
people?
I mean, these are people who are members of the FDA.
And you're exposing them to high levels of mercury vapor
by its still supporting the use of dental amalgams.
The ADA's message is just simple.
And it's been this for many, many years.
And that is that amalgam is a safe and effective
dental material.
It's disconcerting that, despite all the regulations
regarding mercury in the workplace,
mainstream dentistry still promotes these fillings
as perfectly safe.
The science hasn't changed.
The science has been this way for decades.
Unfortunately, there's some groups
who don't accept the science, who
like to rely on fear and other factors.
The ADA is a group that just dismisses and denies without
doing any experiments.
They could be doing the same experiments we're doing,
showing that mercury doesn't come off.
I want to see them do that.
What patient safety and science shows us,
what science shows us now is that patient safety is
absolutely protected with general amalgam material.
When a dentist goes in to grind down the amalgam filling,
he is creating tremendous quantities of mercury
particulate.
So for that period of time they're working,
they're 100-fold over the recommended levels for air
in a workplace.
It's no wonder that people like Karen
are going to have an issue with being in that environment.
I don't believe that the vapors that are...
The come off from the removal of an amalgam are going to put
a patient in harm's way.
Nor do I believe it will put me in harm's way,
although we have masks, of course,
that to some degree protect us.
In dental school, they taught us nothing about protecting
the dentist, the staff, or the patients from the dangers
of mercury vapor.
Dental schools ought to be fearful of major lawsuits,
because this is not a secret anymore.
You can see it coming out.
I mean, the exposure to mercury to those people
is just tremendous.
We are turning now to the OSHA Hazard Communication.
Standard this is a final regulation.
And there is no escape for it, for any of us.
Everyone walking around hazardous chemicals and other
toxic substances has a right to know of possible dangers
and how to protect themselves.
Health care professionals and folks all over the country are
asking the Food and Drug Administration to protect
and inform the public about the potential dangers of silver
amalgam fillings.
Those include my colleague Stacy Case.
Now, we've been following Stacy's personal story
for months now, telling you about her diagnosis
with multiple sclerosis after a routine dental procedure.
And tonight, Stacy is in San Francisco sharing her story
with the federal government.
Nearly four years ago, I let a dentist talk me into having
four 30-year-old silver mercury fillings replaced because he
said they were cracked.
Your agency at the time, though, the FDA,
had done nothing to warn me, an educated professional,
that this was a health hazard.
This is a great injustice.
Seven months after that dental work, I got out of bed one
morning and could not walk.
My children were two and three at the time.
My immediate concern was, will I be caring for them
or will it be the other way around?
I now know that I and millions of other Americans
are genetically predisposed to autoimmune disease.
And these mercury fillings are the trigger in many cases.
I read several dozen scientific studies.
One such study, 1990 University of Denmark,
proved monkeys with mercury dental fillings
stored it in their spinal ganglia, pituitary gland,
and many other organs.
This stuff seeps into the body from the day it is implanted.
Then one day, you reach the tipping point,
like I did, and disease sets in.
Your hand-picked scientists in 2006 and 2010
have made you keenly aware of the health risks
and the disease causation.
Please do not ignore them or injured consumers like me
any longer.
You really want to help this country get health care
costs under control?
Ban amalgam.
You really want to see a cure for many autoimmune diseases?
Ban amalgam.
You really want to ensure American moms
like me can play chase with their children in the yard?
Ban amalgam.
After two decades in the news business, I know the truth.
And the truth is silver mercury fillings are causing disease.
And they are making people sick, keeping them sick,
so help me God.
Use your power and position for good, Dr. Shuren.
Leave a legacy.
Please right this wrong.
We've gone back and we looked at the evidence.
And what I can tell you is we intend
to come out with an announcement by the end of this year.
Since that missed deadline, the FDA has been silent
on where the ruling stands.
Obviously, this has been an emotional journey,
but an important one.
And I just hope that my story affects change.
In San Francisco, Stacy Case.
Scott, back to you.
We've gone back and we looked at the evidence.
And what I can tell you is we intend
to come out with an announcement by the end of this year.
And so 2011 came and went.
And sometime early in 2012, I sent an email to my contact
at FDA.
Response I got was, we'd love to respond,
we sent our document to HHS for approval.
And unfortunately, we don't have a response back yet.
We sued FDA to compel them to respond to our petitions
after waiting very patiently for five, six years.
And they did so.
In January 2015, they came out with a document that completely
affirmed what FDA had found in 2009, which was that mercury
fillings are completely safe.
We, my team, IAOMT team, we were all deeply disappointed.
And then we get this whistleblower document.
It was a document provided prohibitions
on placing mercury fillings in tens of millions of people.
What happened here?
What happened?
HHS came back and provided a political solution
to a thorny scientific problem.
HHS put the veto on this statement of policy
that would have been published by FDA,
but for HHS's political decision,
not scientific, political decision to not change the way
the game was played.
But don't be deceived, there are hundreds
of peer-reviewed published, scientific studies
by top authors that associate the mercury in fillings
with systemic disease.
And so going forward, what are we going to do?
We're going to go back to court and take this document that
was issued way back in 2012 that states what FDA really thought
about all this and ask the court to reinstate the 2012 document.
That's our plan.
Good girl.
And so coming out here, just very relaxing.
Mandy.
She takes off.
And it's a real good working relationship.
No one's ever put mercury vapor in an animal that
didn't make that animal sick.
And yet, our government says, but you
can't prove that it's toxic just because it's there.
The science is there.
It's very clear.
Anyone that has two neurons left to rub together
can look at the research data and see
that mercury should not be placed in the mouth of a child
or to anyone.
And yet, you can't get an honest discussion with our government
or with the medical authorities about this problem.
We have not had any success, taken to them the most solid
science, and I mean tons of it.
So, no, I'm upset about it.
And the science is on my side.
United Nations Environmental Programme
is eliminating mercury, because all the scientists in the world
are worried about mercury decreasing the health
of all humans from any source.
The overall treaty that was accepted
had amalgams as a product that needs to be phased out.
And that's really great news to us,
because that means that we're at the beginning
of the end for amalgam fillings in the world.
I think the job now is to educate the American people.
If you go to a dentist who says the amalgam fillings are
safe and should be placed in your mouth,
then you should find yourself another dentist.
Despite a wealth of studies showing the harm of mercury
as released from the product, the American Dental Association
continues to promote the safety of mercury fillings
and supports its use for anyone and everyone without regard
for reproductive status, age, or any of the known factors that
make a person unusually susceptible to the effects
of mercury.
Hi.
I'm Dr. Gerry Curatola of The International Academy of Oral.
Medicine and Toxicology.
Our organization has been a leader
in mercury-safe dentistry for over 30 years.
I know it might be hard for some to fathom
that measuring and visualizing mercury
vapor during routine dental procedures
could be as easy as portrayed in the movie, but it is.
In fact, if you're skeptical of the findings in the movie,
we encourage every dental professional
to take the Mercury Measurement Challenge.
Our organization has partnered with Mercury Instruments USA
to offer a discounted rental of their equipment
for any dentist who wants to take the Mercury Measurement.
Challenge.
You will find that the mercury vapor released
during the placement and removal of dental amalgam fillings
exceeds occupational safety limits that
requires employee protection.
The American Dental Association recommends
that dentists periodically monitor their office
for dental mercury vapor.
But that suggestion does not go far enough
to make dentists truly aware of the risks of working
with mercury.
It is important for every dental professional
to be aware of occupational safety requirements
to protect and inform our staff from any toxic exposure.
But it all starts with being informed.
I encourage you to visit The International.
Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology website.
Go to www.iaomt.org for more information on the Mercury.
Measurement Challenge.
I watch it fall down to the ground,
cut off the things that weighed me down.
There's nothing left I'm trying to hide, living
life now feeling free inside.
Feeling free inside.
I see the beauty of the sun, another day has just begun.
I start to dream and start to see,
wonder what the world has for me.
What it has for me.
So I'm moving on.
I'm moving on.
And it feels wonderful.
Yeah, wonderful.
I'm moving on.
And it feels wonderful.
Yeah, wonderful to me.