Dr. Palmer shares his journey to becoming a mercury-safe dentist
Dr. Palmer knows the dangers of mercury poisoning firsthand. For 15 years, he placed amalgam fillings. That all changed after he connected the dots between his joint pain and emotional changes to mercury exposure from dental materials. He saw his wife and patients were experiencing their own alarming symptoms, and decided to take action to eliminate these threats for good. Hear his story.
Transcript
I came to IAOMT after about 15 years in practice when I realized at that point in time that you shouldn't be using mercury in dentistry. And for the first 15 years, I did just like I was taught in dental school and taught by the ADA. And the result of
that was I got mercury poisoning from my job. Through the knowledge I gained from the IAOMT, I recovered from the mercury poisoning and stopped doing mercury dentistry and now try to practice safe mercury dentistry.
And by safe I mean, when I take it out, I protect myself, my team and my patients.
I graduated from dental school in ‘82, so what they taught us was that as an amalgam aged, it corroded. And the corrosion products sealed up the amalgam. Now, that is such poor science. I mean that just doesn’t happen. The corrosion they are talking about is the oxidation process that goes on in the mouth which releases more mercury. And the dark stains that begin to get around the stuff is like rust and the mercury is being released into the tissue or the tooth. So that's what’s happening, but that's not what I was taught. So, I was taught that once we mixed all this mercury in with the silver and other ingredients of the amalgam that it was safe and they are still teaching that today. And I really don’t think they teach the corrosion process anymore and they do admit now that some vapor comes off but it's not enough to hurt you.
I found out that mercury was a problem through two things that happened. 1 - A patient came in and she had a Clifford test. She was about a 65-year old female but she looked like she was 80-something, she could barely walk, had a driver to the office, and she came in and told me she wanted me to take all her fillings out and put these composites in. And I argued with her like most dentists would, but I told her I would do it. So, we did it and then she had chelation therapy through a physician and came back to my office about six months later. I didn't even recognize her because she looked her age, she was walking, driving herself, and it was an amazing change. I heard Dr. Bill Strupp in one of his seminars, and he was very against amalgam as a restorative material. I walked back into my office and said I am no longer going to be doing mercury fillings, and my staff said “fantastic!” Then we just threw it all away, we got it out of the office and haven’t placed one since — that was back in 1997.
Well, even before that, around about the same time, my wife had worked for me in my first two years in practice. About the same time as this, she started having symptoms that all doctors said was fibromyalgia. This was when she was in her 30s. And I just refused to believe she had fibromyalgia because I didn't know what it was, the doctors didn't know what it was, and they didn't know what was causing it. They just labeled her symptoms of pain, muscle pain, tiredness, weakness, joint pain as fibromyalgia. So, I sent her to an internist who treated fibromyalgia and also treated chronic pain patients, and he tested her for mercury toxicity. What happened was that she was full of it. She had gotten contaminated in the two years she worked chairside for me. So, that made me think, if she's got mercury poisoning maybe that's why my elbow hurts all the time, that's why my wrist hurts all the time, and my thumb hurts all the time and that's why I'm getting so irritable and short-tempered. So, I had my test done and I was off the charts.
The way I got treated - I went to a physician who understood mercury poisoning and it took two years of chelation treatment to get my mercury levels down to the accepted level which is below three. That was every month - I’d get IV chelation treatments, took some drugs to pull out the mercury, and you have to go slow and pull it out slowly. Well, my symptoms were relieved immediately after about two months. I started seeing improvement in my health and my symptoms went away, joint pain went away. I have absolutely no symptoms now. It's great. What the IAOMT is hoping to accomplish is to make dentistry safer for patients, for team members and for the dentists who are doing the dentistry. And the first thing to make dentistry safer is to eliminate mercury in dentistry. It's an archaic restorative material and as a restorative material, it's not a good material. It expands and contracts more than the tooth, it causes cracks in the teeth, and the retention that has to be cut into a tooth weakens the tooth. It's just the first step of a tooth fracture and having to have a crown later, maybe a root canal. We have much, much better restorative materials today that are a lot safer. We have composites, and we have porcelain. We can almost totally eliminate any metals in the mouth in dentistry today.
I graduated from dental school in ‘82, so what they taught us was that as an amalgam aged, it corroded. And the corrosion products sealed up the amalgam. Now, that is such poor science. I mean that just doesn’t happen. The corrosion they are talking about is the oxidation process that goes on in the mouth which releases more mercury. And the dark stains that begin to get around the stuff is like rust and the mercury is being released into the tissue or the tooth. So that's what’s happening, but that's not what I was taught. So, I was taught that once we mixed all this mercury in with the silver and other ingredients of the amalgam that it was safe and they are still teaching that today. And I really don’t think they teach the corrosion process anymore and they do admit now that some vapor comes off but it's not enough to hurt you.
I found out that mercury was a problem through two things that happened. 1 - A patient came in and she had a Clifford test. She was about a 65-year old female but she looked like she was 80-something, she could barely walk, had a driver to the office, and she came in and told me she wanted me to take all her fillings out and put these composites in. And I argued with her like most dentists would, but I told her I would do it. So, we did it and then she had chelation therapy through a physician and came back to my office about six months later. I didn't even recognize her because she looked her age, she was walking, driving herself, and it was an amazing change. I heard Dr. Bill Strupp in one of his seminars, and he was very against amalgam as a restorative material. I walked back into my office and said I am no longer going to be doing mercury fillings, and my staff said “fantastic!” Then we just threw it all away, we got it out of the office and haven’t placed one since — that was back in 1997.
Well, even before that, around about the same time, my wife had worked for me in my first two years in practice. About the same time as this, she started having symptoms that all doctors said was fibromyalgia. This was when she was in her 30s. And I just refused to believe she had fibromyalgia because I didn't know what it was, the doctors didn't know what it was, and they didn't know what was causing it. They just labeled her symptoms of pain, muscle pain, tiredness, weakness, joint pain as fibromyalgia. So, I sent her to an internist who treated fibromyalgia and also treated chronic pain patients, and he tested her for mercury toxicity. What happened was that she was full of it. She had gotten contaminated in the two years she worked chairside for me. So, that made me think, if she's got mercury poisoning maybe that's why my elbow hurts all the time, that's why my wrist hurts all the time, and my thumb hurts all the time and that's why I'm getting so irritable and short-tempered. So, I had my test done and I was off the charts.
The way I got treated - I went to a physician who understood mercury poisoning and it took two years of chelation treatment to get my mercury levels down to the accepted level which is below three. That was every month - I’d get IV chelation treatments, took some drugs to pull out the mercury, and you have to go slow and pull it out slowly. Well, my symptoms were relieved immediately after about two months. I started seeing improvement in my health and my symptoms went away, joint pain went away. I have absolutely no symptoms now. It's great. What the IAOMT is hoping to accomplish is to make dentistry safer for patients, for team members and for the dentists who are doing the dentistry. And the first thing to make dentistry safer is to eliminate mercury in dentistry. It's an archaic restorative material and as a restorative material, it's not a good material. It expands and contracts more than the tooth, it causes cracks in the teeth, and the retention that has to be cut into a tooth weakens the tooth. It's just the first step of a tooth fracture and having to have a crown later, maybe a root canal. We have much, much better restorative materials today that are a lot safer. We have composites, and we have porcelain. We can almost totally eliminate any metals in the mouth in dentistry today.
