History of Scientific Studies

How did this happen?
​A historical perspective on how the use of toxins became so pervasive worldwide. 

Mercury exposure from amalgams
​The mercury fillings were quicker and easier to use than previous materials so, even though they caused dramatic health problems and and their use in the 1840s was condemned, a renegade faction in dentistry refused to quit using them. In the 1850s, the renegades formed their own dental association and this is what become known as the American Dental Association (ADA). Defending the use of mercury and claiming that it is safe become the ADA's unifying, founding principle. For over a century has promoted the falsehood that the mercury in the amalgam is stable or and, sometimes, falsehood that the mercury used in amalgam fillings is “a different kind of mercury,” one that is safe, which is blatantly false.
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In the early 1930s a German chemist named Alfred Stock, PhD, measured the mercury being released from amalgam fillings and studied the many harmful health conditions that mercury from amalgam fillings can cause. Stock found that his own forgetfulness and brain fog was due to his being mercury poisoned. Stock led a wave of scientific research on dental mercury and led an international movement for it to be banned. But his chemistry lab in Frankfurt Germany was destroyed in the early 1930s when allied bombers bombed it into ruins. This ended Alfred Stock's crusade against the use of dental mercury in dentistry. 

But the torch never went out  In the 1960s, a Brazilian dentist, Olympia Pinto, came to the United States and attempted to research the safety of dental amalgam fillings. He was thwarted in his attempts to research the subject, but some years later he met an American dentist, Hal Huggins, and Pinto shared his knowledge about the hazards of mercury amalgams. It was the 1980s and American Hal Huggins began his own research studies back in the US, and found that mercury amalgams were poisoning patients who had them and that their blood chemistry improved dramatically following safe amalgam removal and detoxification. A movement to investigate the concern over amalgam’s safety was launched in America and led to a new world wide movement to ban them. In 1988 researchers at the University of Iowa, using improved mercury vapor measurement methods, published findings that a significant amount of mercury is being released from amalgam fillings at all times. Their results were published in a prestigous British journal, The Lancet. There followed a torrent of research into how mercury is released from dental amalgam fillings and animal and human studies provided convincing evidence that mercury from amalgams is harmful to many systems in he body and can target many vital organs.
 
Science and history on mercury coming from amalgam fillings.  Amalgams were found to be the greatest personal source of mercury, greater than all sources from food, water and air combined. Murray Vimy, DMD, and Fritz Lorscheider, PhD, both at the University of Calgary School of Medicine, did studies involving the placement of amalgam fillings having mercury that was radioactive so as to allow the tracing of whether the mercury could go to other parts of the bod. The radioactive mercury was first placed in a pregnant sheep and then later in a pregnant monkey. The radioactive mercury was found to have spread through maternal blood into the fetus within two days. The highest amalgam mercury concentrations were found in the liver and the pituitary gland of the fetus. In the pregnant sheep’s body mercury had spread into many other parts of the body within 30 days of placement and it particularly targeted the kidneys, the heart, the thyroid, and the GI tract. With mercury having crossed the placental barrier and gotten into the unborn fetus, dental amalgam fillings were shown to be a hazard to pregnancies and to the unborn babies. Researchers around the US, Canada and Europe confirmed the research of Vimy and Lorscheider and expanded on it. Many of them concluded that amalgam mercury fillings would soon be banned. 

In 1994, a German study on newborn babies that had died suddenly, as from SIDS, "sudden infant death syndrome," found a strong correlation between the mercury in some of the fetal tissues and the amount of dental amalgam fillings in the mother’s mouth. Many European studies launched mercury amalgam studies on animals and humans and harmful effects on brains and behavior due to prenatal exposure to mercury vapor. Researchers found that dentists had highly elevated levels of mercury in the pituitary glands compared to a non-dentist control ground; the dentist group had mercury levels in the pituitary gland that were forty times higher. Anne Sommers, PhD, at the University of Georgia, impacted the mix of bacteria in the intestines, by giving rise to mercury resistant bacteria that had also become anti-biotic resistant. 
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In 1994, in the US,  a biochemist, Boyd Haley, and his team found that low dose mercury causes the neurofibrillary tangles that are one of the markers of Alzheimer’s disease. Their published paper explained the biochemistry of exactly how the low dose mercury causes the neurofibrillary tangles. The implication was that dental mercury, while perhaps not being the sole cause of Alzheimer’s disease, would certainly exacerbate the problem. In 1999 a biologist, Mark Richardson, PhD, did a  risk specialist of amalgam’s safety for Health Canada, which is Canada’s counterpart to the FDA. Richardson reported to Health Canada that mercury amalgams provide about 50% or more of a typical adult’s mercury exposure and present “an unacceptable hazard: to a patient’s health. The agency announced some guidelines cautioning against the use of amalgams in children, pregnant women and people with kidney disorders. But Health Canada did not ban amalgams as many had hoped.

All of the scientists mentioned above and many other independent scientists continued to research the hazards of dental mercury fillings and called for a halt to the use of  amalgam fillings.