Why Are Many Dentists Still Using this Toxic Substance?

Scott: A lot of dentists don't use mercury anymore, in terms of fillings.  Still, I talked to one just two weeks ago that still, on occasion, will under certain circumstances.  Why?

Dr. Hal Huggins: Because they don't want to remove the tooth.  Because the dentist is taught to believe in the tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth.  But if you've got something that's rotted off or broken off at the gumline, well, you can drill holes and put little pins down in it and build amalgam on it and stick a crown on it and hey, aesthetically and functionally, you've got a good situation.  But aside from the aesthetics and the function, you've also created a disease process in that patient which nobody's ever going to come back and connect to you.

I used to have a chiropractor working for me.  He discovered some strange and marvolous things about what batteries do in the body.  That was real interesting.  He was a neat guy.  He was, you know, chiropractors are very much into nutrition and health and all this sort of thing.  He went to a dentist that I didn't know.  I didn't know he was going.  And two days later, he had a fatal heart attack and left four little children.  I know why.  That dentist is still doing that procedure as a specialist and getting paid tremendous amounts of money to do that to other people.  But nobody ever comes back to him and says 'hey, this guy's in the ground because of you.'  He'd say 'no, I'm doing state-of-the-art.  Just like the high copper amalgam that puts out 50 times more mercury than before 1976.  State-of-the-art.  It is time to change the art for those people that are interested in their health.  And those are the ones I'm looking for.

If you want a root canal, if you want an amalgam, if you want to smoke, if want to drink and so on.  Hey, that's fine!  It's your body, it's your choice.  But I think you deserve to have informed consent.  Because there are very few people in this country who don't know what cigarette smoking can do, what excess drinking can do, what driving too fast can do.  But you know the consequences, you made the choice.  But I have had physicians flat out call me a liar and say 'there is no way dentistry would be using mercury.  I know they did 100 years ago, but you cannot convince me that dentists are using mercury today.'  Look on the bottle.  Only in the advertisements to dentists, they don't tell them it's 50 percent mercury.  

I was teaching a course 20-30 years ago.  And a dentist came up to me, it was a five day course.  And he came up to me at the end and said, 'do you know the most challenging thing that you said during these five days?  The thing that educated me most?'  I said 'what's that'?  He said 'that amalgam is 50 percent mercury'.  I said 'how long have you been a dentist?'  He said '17 years.  And I had no idea.  They told us there was a trace of mercury in there.'  Well 50 percent is not a trace.  He said 'that's the thing that shocked me more than anything else.'