To the Editor ADA News:
ADANews@ADA.org
After having read an article about how the ADA felt that best management practices were all the profession needed, I wrote a letter to the editor, which, once again wasn’t published. I had a problem with your painting the profession as one that was very much concerned about the environment and we understood about the mercury our practices dealt with on a daily basis. I knew for a fact that most dentists won’t voluntarily install separators. I had a problem with the terminology. These devices are MERCURY separators, they are not, as you called them: amalgam separators.
Dentists have been taught that mercury, once in compound, becomes inert. We know, from the work of Vimy, and others, that this couldn’t be further from the truth. What the profession doesn’t know, is that mercury is the most toxic, naturally occurring substance on the planet surface. I never even heard a lecture about mercury, until I attended my first IAOMT meeting.
In the April 20, 2009 ADA News, you feature two letters to the editor, which made me wonder: “How do letters like these from Dr. Hurowitz of San Francisco, and Dr. Guerra of Utica, NY get published, but I never see mine?”
Dr. Hurowitz’s errors are corrected by the Editor, but smack of the ignorance dentists have about mercury. To believe that traps and filters are all that are necessary is truly the overall belief of the profession. They believe that to be best management practice. In speaking with assistants who temp or are trained in other offices, there is a cavalier attitude to how mercury is disposed of.
Dr. Guerra states that “It has been scientifically proven that the amount of free mercury released from amalgam is virtually zero.” He obviously hasn’t read the right research, and you might have referred him to the work of Dr. Boyd Haley, and Dr. Maurry Vimy.
It’s time that dentists got their collective heads out of the sand. The ADA, the organization that kept insisting mercury fillings (not silver fillings, they’re 50% Hg doc) were inert has seen the light of day. For them to come out and tell you BMP’s and separators are necessary should tell you, as I learned about 20 years ago, that you need to re-educate yourselves.
You need not only to understand what you’re putting into patients’ mouths, but more importantly, you need to understand what the health and environmental effects of the removal of mercury fillings are. That mercury slurry, laying on the floor of a thin mucosa with vascular interchange immediately beneath is as disgusting to me as thinking about working without gloves on. There is a protocol for safe removal of mercury both for the patient, and the community at large.
Wake up doctor! You’ve always put your scrap in a tightly closed glass jar, under antifreeze or other high specific gravity liquid. If mercury were inert, why couldn’t you just have your patient spit in the jar?
Vimy’s research, first on sheep, and then again on primates, using a radioisotope of mercury in his amalgams showed that the radioisotope distributed to all tissues of the body, congregating in the greatest density in the brain. In pregnant test animals, it crossed the placenta two times faster than in got to the brain.
Dr. Stephen J. Markus
University of Pennsylvania
School of Dental Medicine ‘75
Haddon Heights, NJ