Mercury in dental fillings

You gotta love the FDA. Leave it to them to objectively weight out all the evidence, look at a health problem from every side and from all angles, dissect, extrapolate, scrutinize and quantify it...

Then issue exactly the WRONG recommendation. Again.

This time, it's with regard to mercury amalgam dental fillings. According to a September article run by the Associated Press, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has reviewed 34 recent research studies that have NOT swayed them from their long-time position that mercury fillings in teeth pose no measurable threat to patients, except in rare instances of allergic reactions.

Of course, this comes as no surprise, at least not to me. The FDA knows which side its bread is buttered on: The side that ensures the profitability of, and insulates from liability, what's currently accepted in mainstream medicine (or dentistry). Keep in mind that this is the same agency that almost always sides with Big Pharma over the safety of prescription drugs - even though by some estimates they kill over 300,000 Americans every year...

Among the unspecified "research" the FDA reviewed were no doubt a pair of child studies that made headlines back in April of this year - one from Portugal and another from New England. I wrote to you about these studies on May 5. They were, in my opinion, methodologically worthless. Neither study had more than around 500 hundred subjects, and neither tracked these kids for very long (seven years at the longest).

Well, mercury poisoning isn't terribly common to begin with. In any given group of 500, you likely won't have a single case! Besides this, the symptoms of mercury poisoning don't tend to manifest for many years, except in severe cases. So I ask the FDA and the medical establishment that trumpeted the April studies with such glee: What good are small-scale, short-duration studies in determining the true effects of mercury amalgam fillings?

I wonder how many of the 34 studies the FDA reviewed were similarly worthless.

What we really need is a long-term analysis of, say, 500,000 subjects - like the Danish study on vaccination and autism rates that forced me to re-think my position on mercury-based preservatives in childhood vaccines (Daily Dose, 5/5/2006). Don't get me wrong: I'm still against the over-vaccination of children, but not because of the mercury/autism risks.

Even in the absence of a mammoth study specifically targeting mercury amalgam fillings, there's plenty of evidence out there damning them. I've written about some of it before in the Daily Dose - including one I've cited in the past that shows dental fillings to be the greatest single source of mercury exposure in humans. A lifetime's exposure to the vapors emitted by these fillings has been linked to serious autoimmune diseases like Lupus and MS.

And as I wrote in my May 5 Daily Dose, when you add this together with...

• Another study, from the University of Texas, showing a clear relationship between atmospheric mercury vapors inhaled by expectant mothers and a 17% increase in autism rates (Daily Dose, 6/7/2005) among their newborns.
  
  
• The repeated FDA and state Fisheries Management bureau warnings regarding the hazardous mercury content of fresh-caught fishes in our nation's streams, rivers, lakes and coastal waters. Currently, 43 of 50 states have issued such cautions against eating many varieties of otherwise healthy and delicious game fish.

...What you end up with is a pretty persuasive picture that mercury ingestion is a bad scene, health-wise - whether it's inhaled (like from coal-plant emissions or MERCURY FILLINGS), or eaten in our foods.

But if you've been with me for a while, you've heard all this before. My greater point for today's essay is that just because the FDA says something's safe (read: Vioxx, Prozac or Prempro) doesn't mean that's what the evidence really shows - it often just means that's the recommendation that stands to profit the medical (or dental) establishment the most. In my experience, the agency is not above the blatant cover-up of sketchy health findings.

After all, imagine what chaos would ensue if the FDA's findings had shown mercury amalgam fillings to be deadly - there'd be lawsuits against the agency, investigations, Congressional hearings, perhaps even a trial in the Supreme Court...

And all that hubbub just would not be good for business.