Amalgam fillings (silver fillings) are made up of 50% mercury. Every time you eat and bite on those fillings, vapors of mercury are released and absorbed by your body. Those mercury ions also diffuse into the pulp (nerve and blood vessels of the tooth) and can go into your bloodstream.
Mercury is toxic to your whole body but mainly to your nervous system. When absorbed by your body, mercury tends to bind to fatty cells. Most of your nerve cells are wrapped in fat by what is called myelin. In fact, your brain is made up of 60% fat coming from those myelin cells. Other than being toxic to your central and peripheral nervous system, mercury is known to be harmful to your digestive and immune systems, lungs, and kidneys.
Other than being toxic to your body, amalgam is also not an ideal restorative material. Over time, amalgam fillings tend to expand three dimensionally which leads to major cracks in teeth. Eventually, those cracks will be the reason for the fracture of cusps or even bigger part of teeth.
Our Protocol
When you have those amalgam fillings removed by a non-biological dentist who does not have any safety protocol in place, you are exposed to an extremely high level of mercury vapor. This is because the only way to remove those old fillings is to drill through them causing a lot of heat and small particles. Since there is no barrier of protection, most of those pieces of amalgam go directly in your mouth or to your nose in vapor form.
For this reason, at Millennium Dental Associates, we use a protocol that combines both the SMART protocol (Safe mercury amalgam removal technique by the IAOMT) and the Protect protocol (created by the IABDM). During your appointment, you will be given bindings agents (chlorella and activated charcoal), have a dental dam protecting anything from going into your mouth, receive oxygen to not breath any mercury vapors and there will be two extra air filtration in the room to recapture any vapor left. A chelation cream will be placed around the treated tooth to absorb any residue of mercury. We will try to remove the filling in large chunks and by avoiding drilling into it as much as possible. If necessary, an x-ray will be taken afterward to confirm the complete removal of the amalgam filling.
Our dentists and staff members will also wear extra protective eyewear and breathing equipment to create a barrier from the pieces and vapor created by the removal of mercury.
Metal in Crowns
Older crowns were often porcelain-fused-to-metal (PFM) which meant they had a layer of metal underneath the porcelain (white part of the crown). Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, the metal used for those crowns contained tin, zinc, nickel, cobalt, indium, chromium, beryllium, ruthenium, and gallium. A lot of those metals are known to create chronic allergic reactions.
This is something often seen in people having allergic reactions to cheap jewelry, mainly to nickel and cobalt. The main issue here is that unlike jewelry, someone having an allergic reaction to a crown cannot remove it at will like it would be possible with earrings, rings, or necklace. It is for that reason that we strongly recommend removing those crowns for new ones made completely of porcelain.
Metal crowns can also cause galvanism which is an electric current that can impact your oral tissues, cause discomfort and give a metallic taste in the mouth. This is the result of having different metals from the alloy in the crown or other metals in the mouth (gold crowns, lingual bar, partial denture, titanium implant, etc.) in an environment that facilitate the movement of an electric current with the help of the saliva.
