by Debbie Neumayer
Copyright September 2014. All rights reserved.
Many
disorders affecting health of the brain and entire nervous system are
reaching epidemic status today. These neurodegenerative diseases include
multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s
disease, named after a famous ALS-afflicted American baseball player who
eventually passed at the age of 36 from complications).
ALS is short for “amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis.” Symptoms of this disease manifest as progressive loss of voluntary
muscle movement that impacts a person’s ability to eat, speak, walk, and sometimes even breathe. Currently, ALS is considered 100 percent fatal (as far as
drug interventions go).
Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge?
The recent Ice Bucket Challenge has
raised awareness for ALS by making a two-week splash all across America. It soaked
the media during the first two weeks in August, 2014, promoted heavily by
online and print media. Common citizens and celebrities alike rallied forth and
participated in this much publicized campaign.
According to the ALS Association
website, this movement was a resounding success. “Between July 29 and today,
August 12, the ALS Association and its 38 chapters have received an astonishing
$4 million in donations compared to $1.12 million during the same time period
last year.”
Their stated mission is to find a
cure while funding the highest quality of care for people afflicted with ALS. But
in what direction are they going to find a cure? The website states: “Currently,
there is only one drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
to treat ALS, which only modestly extends survival by two to three months.”
Barbara Newhouse, President and CEO
of The ALS Association declares, "With more people aware and more people
engaged in the fight against ALS, we are poised to work collaboratively with
not only other ALS organizations, but also with pharmaceutical companies and
academia to expedite new treatments for people impacted by the disease."1
That is a worthy philanthropic
quest, but isn’t there a vast difference between a treatment and a cure? Isn’t
one just palliative and the other absolute? You can treat the symptoms of a
disease forever and not get to the root cause. Pharmaceuticals may offer
temporary symptomatic relief but—given the choice--wouldn’t an ALS patient opt
for eliminating the entire disorder?
This would offer a much better quality of life than being relegated to a
lifetime of taking expensive drugs that might even cause additional harm.
Once you discover the cause(s) of a
disease, therein lays the cure. So it makes cents (pardon the pun) to (1) educate people on the source of a
disorder, (2) remove the offending agents, and then (3) give the body the natural
help it needs to get well.
The Case Against Mercury Fillings
I
remember as a child, my mom wouldn’t let me play with a thermometer. She was
afraid I would break it and those little silver roly-poly globules of mercury would
come out and poison me. As it turns out, I didn’t have to worry about mercury
from a broken thermometer and neither did most children my age. It turns out
that, with the best of intentions, our parents were paying good money for
dental procedures that poisoned us slowly with mercury from the inside out.
How
is this possible? It’s been discovered that vapor from mercury dental fillings is
one of the most hazardous substances known. This outdated dental material is an
amalgam (mixture) of various metal materials, typically an alloy of 50 percent
mercury, 35 percent silver, 13 percent tin, 2 percent copper, and a bit of
zinc. According to historical records, mercury amalgam fillings have been used
since the 1800s. At that time, they were called “amalgam plugs” and the mercury
was called quicksilver, probably because of its silver color.
Even
back then, the dental community was divided as to using this toxic metal in
fillings and is still a subject of controversy among them to this very day. Even
though mercury is considered a toxic substance by the Environmental Protection
Agency and there is much evidenced-based science attesting to its deleterious
effects on the brain, nervous system and entire body, the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) and American Dental Association (ADA) still adamantly refuse
to budge and outlaw these fillings.
It
used to be thought that the mercury couldn’t leak out, once the filling was
placed in a tooth. However, with the aid of modern testing techniques, we now
know better. Mercury fillings release vapor at every chew and this vapor infiltrates
the blood brain barrier, causing brain inflammation via oxidative stress from
cascades of free radicals. Neurological damage begins with a domino effect of
“excitotoxicity” that literally shakes the neurons to death.
There
is much evidence linking ALS and similar neurodegenerative diseases to mercury and other heavy
metal toxicity. Mercury
vapor makes its way from the teeth to the brain, and through a series of
biochemical pathways, changes into methyl mercury.
This
form of mercury is especially damaging to cell membranes, and can bypass the protective
shield in the brain known as the blood brain barrier. Mercury has shown to
penetrate and degrade this tight network of capillaries and force its way in,
causing what some have dubbed a “leaky brain.” After mercury invades the brain
and nervous system, this insidious poison sets up a chain reaction of nerve
cell death, setting the stage for neurodegenerative disease. 2
In many ways, our body systems and
pathways are similar to that of certain species in the animal kingdom. Shouldn’t
we be concerned and alarmed when studies show that within one year of placing
amalgam into the teeth of monkeys and rats, widespread mercury accumulation has
been discovered in their bodies, including the brain, trigeminal ganglia,
spinal ganglia, kidneys, liver, lungs, hormone glands, and lymph glands? 3,4,5,
6,7
Where Do We Go from Here?
Right
on the heels of the Ice Bucket Challenge, the fourth annual Mercury-Free Dentistry
Week was held from September 7-13. Although this seven-day event especially highlighted
the dangers of mercury in fillings, the crusade to abolish them is ongoing and won’t stop until the public is educated
and government officials make some serious changes to laws.
The global movement to eliminate the use of mercury in dental fillings is supported by many professionals around the world. In the United States, they include Consumers for Dental Choice, Dr. Joseph Mercola, and biological
dentists. You can get up to speed on the topic via
Facebook, and informative websites like http://www.toxicteeth.org/
and www.mercola.com 8
Don’t
worry if Mercury-Free Dentistry Week has come and gone…you can still become
involved and spread the word about this vital issue to others via social media (sans buckets of ice).
One caution: before
you have your mercury fillings yanked out, it’s very important that you contact
a biological dentist who is trained in the correct protocol for removing them.
There are certain precautions that must be in place to protect you and your
body from the flood of mercury vapor that will be released during the
procedure.
In my next blog, I will examine the differences between biological and traditional dentistry. Stay tuned and read all about it on Friday, September 19!
In my next blog, I will examine the differences between biological and traditional dentistry. Stay tuned and read all about it on Friday, September 19!
References
- www.alsa.org
- http://www.medical-library.net/mercury_toxicity.html
- Fenglian XU, Svetlana Farkas, Simone Kortbeek, et al. Mercury-induced toxicity of rat cortical neurons is mediated through N-methyl-D-Aspartate receptors. Molecular Brain 2012, 5:30.
- Galic N, Ferencic Z et al, Dental amalgam mercury exposure in rats. Biometals. 1999 Sep;12(3):227-31;
- Arvidson B, Arvidsson J, Johansson K,. Mercury deposits in neurons of the trigeminal ganglia after insertion of dental amalgam in rats. Biometals. 1994 Jul;7(3):261-3
- Danscher G, Horsted-Bindslev P, Rungby J. Traces of mercury in organs from primates with amalgam fillings. Exp Mol Pathol. 1990 Jun;52(3):291-9
- L.Hahn et al, Distribution of mercury released from amalgam fillings into monkey tissues”, FASEB J.,1990, 4:5536
- http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/04/07/dangers-of-mercury-contamination.aspx
