Are Amalgam/Mercury/Silver Fillings Safe?

While silver/amalgam fill­ings are not requested very often in our prac­tice, as most pre­fer to have fill­ings that blend in with their nat­ural teeth, they are some­thing that we do when sit­u­a­tions war­rant, as I dis­cussed in an ear­lier post.

How­ever, when it comes to the gen­eral topic of sil­ver fill­ings, there are a lot of mis­con­cep­tions, myths, and out­right false­hoods out there.  There are groups that CLAIM to have proof of a vast con­spir­acy by den­tists to poi­son our pop­u­la­tion by using sil­ver fill­ings (these are prob­a­bly the same groups who believe that flu­o­ride is a Rus­sion attempt at mind-control of US cit­i­zens so they can take us over — hasn’t hap­pened yet, and the con­spir­acy has been around for decades.); these groups CLAIM to have sci­en­tific proof that the mer­cury in sil­ver fill­ings is poi­son that will lead to an absolutely amaz­ing range of dis­eases, and that the sim­ple removal of those amal­gam fill­ings will almost mag­i­cally cure those dis­eases.  And it gets even wilder than that, but unless you’re specif­i­cally look­ing for a good laugh at how crazy these con­spir­acy the­o­ries get, I won’t bore you with all of them.

Let me be per­fectly clear about my stance on this issue:

To date, there is absolutely NO, repeat NO CREDIBLE EVIDENCE that the small amounts of mer­cury present in amalgam/silver fill­ings causes any dis­ease or dis­or­der whatsoever.

I hope that was clear enough. 

If sil­ver fill­ings were as bad as the con­spir­acy the­o­rists claim, then pretty much the whole world would be crazy, as amal­gam fill­ings have been placed by the bil­lions over the last 100+ years.  My par­ents, for exam­ple, would have been beset by a myr­iad of ill­nesses, as both of them had a mouth­ful of sil­ver fill­ings for many decades, and only recently have they been replaced as they’ve slowly worn out.  Any strange ill­nesses in either of them?  Nope.  Noth­ing changed after they were taken out 1-by-1 either.

As a rather inter­est­ing side note: dur­ing my den­tal school years at the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina at Chapel Hill School of Den­tistry, I did a 2-month sum­mer exchange at the den­tal school in Munich, Ger­many.  While there, I was approached by sev­eral pro­fes­sors to proof-read some stud­ies that they had trans­lated prior to pub­lish­ing them in English-language den­tal jour­nals.  Please bear in mind that Ger­many has pretty much banned amal­gam fill­ings for many years, so it’s not like they are fans of the mate­r­ial.  These pro­fes­sors had car­ried out a study that attempted to find a link between the pres­ence of amal­gam fil­ings and a wide range of dis­eases and dis­or­ders; the study had lasted 5–6 years.  And what were the results?  Sim­ply this:

They were unable to find any pos­i­tive evi­dence of a con­nec­tion between the amal­gam fill­ings and ANY of the list of dis­eases and dis­or­ders that they had listed.  Not one.

Kind of inter­est­ing com­ing from pro­fes­sors in a coun­try that has prac­ti­cally banned the mate­r­ial for as long as they have, don’t you think?