Chew on this... - but don't swallow

True Stories

Chapter 1:

My Story, and How I Got

Involved with The Most Insidious

Problem of the 21st Century

I had just received my blood test results from Colorado Springs General Hospital. The lab-made large red circles around the numbers indicating the presence of 1% metablastic cells in my blood. This meant that I had the beginning stage of chronic metablastic leukemia, which has a five-year survival rate. I was 42 years old, with three little children. I had been a general dentist for a little more than ten years.

In fact, my dental career was just starting to take off when I received the news about my leukemia, with the prognosis of a death that would come much sooner, rather than later. How could this be happening to me? I didn’t know much about leukemia back then. I was experiencing a lot of confusion and anger, and I wondered, “Why me?” I also knew I had a long road ahead of me.

Yet, in the end, my recovery from leukemia led me to reevaluate and eventually change the way I had been routinely practicing dentistry. In essence, the death threat my body gave me provided me with a completely new way of looking at health in particular and life in general. Getting better also helped me make sense of issues that I had endured since childhood, back when my first mercury fillings were placed.

To say that I had very poor reading skills as a child is an understatement. I was in remedial reading classes from the third grade all the way into college. I could not pass the entrance test for English 101, because I couldn’t finish reading a sentence without going back to its beginning. When I completed a paragraph, I had no comprehension of what I had just read.

On the other hand, it was clear that I had a high IQ and had been given many gifts. Being a skillful reader just wasn’t one of them! After completing the Evelyn Wood reading course twice, I was allowed to enter a remedial English class. From that point, I somehow was able to slide through my classes.

Somewhere along this frustrating path, I discovered I had an aptitude for music, where reading skills were not mandatory. This emerged as a natural choice for me when the time for college arrived. After all, even though musicians read music, we also have plenty of opportunities to practice, over and over again, before any performance. Therefore, memorization can replace reading.

In my senior year of college, I realized that making a living playing music is reserved for only a very few, and I wasn’t going to be one of them. The only other option at that point was to teach. But teaching music was nowhere near as much fun as playing music, so I quit school. At that moment, my bill-paying father insisted that I get a real job. Since I had no applicable skills other than music, I was very fortunate when I learned about a position as a dental assistant. It was the only job I found that did not require any previous experience, and I was hired.

During my very first day as a dental assistant, I fell in love with dentistry. Our first patient that day was a woman who had severe gum disease and, unfortunately, had to have all of her upper teeth taken out. She had a full denture placed in her mouth. Her mouth was a mess when she came into the office that morning, but she looked like an entirely different person when she left later that day. She was thrilled with her new look and elated that she now had enough teeth in her mouth to be able to chew again.

The surgery itself was fascinating, but the joyful way this woman reacted after the completion of her dental work was truly overwhelming. That was it! I was hooked at once. I knew that I was going to stay in the dental field for the rest of my life. Little did I know that while we were helping so many people, by removing the non-restorable teeth in their mouths, we were also inadvertently poisoning them most of the time, with mercury amalgam fillings, root canal treatments, heavy-metal nickel crowns, and dentures made with heavy-metal pigments and metallic clasps. Even patients who didn’t need teeth replaced were poisoned with toxic fluoride treatments. This was the standard of dental care back then and still is the standard today.

At the beginning of my dental career as a dental assistant, I worked every day in a small, nine-by-nine-foot room. There, I mixed liquid mercury with a powder made of zinc, copper, silver, and tin. Then, I squeezed and kneaded that mixture with my bare hands. We didn’t wear gloves or facemasks in those days. Doing so would not have mattered anyway, as far as the absorption of toxic metals is concerned. I had no idea I was poisoning myself on a daily basis with one of the most toxic materials on the planet.

Sadly, this daily exposure to mercury in my bare hands was aggravated by the 18 new mercury-amalgam fillings I now had in my own teeth. Three of these were replacements of mercury fillings I had received when I was a teenager. No wonder I couldn’t read or comprehend anything written, I was mercury toxic and I did not know it!

About six months after starting my job as a dental assistant, I began to see the symptoms of my mercury poisoning. Of course, at that time I didn’t know that they were signs of mercury toxicity. As I handed the dentist an instrument one day, he looked up and asked, “What is that rash on your forearm?” I looked at my arm and noticed some red welts building up from the top of my inner arm and extending all the way down to my wrist. The bumps began to get itchy. The more I scratched, the itchier they got. Then, the red bumps started to spread up my neck and down my back. I couldn’t stop scratching.

The dentist kindly relieved me for the day. By the time I got home, I was one big hive, from the top of my head, down to the bottom of my toes! In fact, I even had hives between my toes! The physician said that I had “contact dermatitis.” This is simply the medical way of saying that my skin was irritated because I was reacting allergically to something. He didn’t know what was causing the allergy, so he gave me a shot of cortisone and sent me home to lie naked between two cotton sheets. They were all I could bear to touch.

About a year after the outbreak of my initial rash, my boss noticed that my neck was swollen and suggested I have it checked out. I called the doctor on a Monday, and by Friday my thyroid gland had been removed. I was only 21 years old! After the surgery, when the doctor said that the tumor had been benign, I asked the obvious question, “Why did you take it out?” His response was basically, “Well, it was swollen so we had to remove it to make sure that it wasn’t a cancerous tumor.” Then I asked him if he could put it back and his response was “What is done is done. No problem, you simply have to take thyroid medication for the rest of your life!”

I continued to have regular outbreaks of hives for the next 30 years. I even had a series of allergy tests done at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. I was desperate to find out what was causing my allergic reactions. In short, they told me that I was allergic to everything! Soon thereafter, I developed a Lupus-type red rash on my face and was told I also had rosacea. I was, quite simply, a mess.

The diagnosis given to someone who is allergic to everything is “environmentally ill,” or “E.I.”. These people react to everything, and I was one of them. We can’t identify what is making us ill; therefore, we can’t avoid those things. In my case, I eliminated certain foods, and then different fabrics. When that didn’t work, I began to eliminate hobbies exposing me to potential allergens, such as the colored threads in my embroidery. I even had to avoid common plastics (such as plastic grocery bags) and their fumes, as they caused reactions as well. At that time, no one made the connection between the mercury I was squeezing with my fingers, my thyroid problem, the hives I was getting, and the other health problems I was developing. This inability to connect a variety of symptoms is very common and typical in the medical community. Even today, holistic and alternative therapies are completely disregarded. Even when these other treatments are successful, all too often the “conventional doctor” has no interest in how a patient achieved the positive results!

Furthermore, symptoms potentially caused by mercury toxicity are often not associated with mercury fillings until a complete and proper dental revision has been done and certain symptoms have disappeared or improved. This varies for each and every patient, so at this time it is impossible for medical professionals to evaluate accurately which health conditions could be related to mercury and which ones, if any, will improve or disappear or not, after the dental revision.

Five years after my complete dental revision, the red Lupus-like rash on my face cleared up. During that time, I also changed my dental practice into a “holistic”, or biological, mercury-free dental office. Consequently, because I changed my practice, and now protect myself from mercury exposure, I no longer break out in hives as I did from the top of my head to the bottom of my toes. My hives have gotten remarkably better over the past 30 years. Although, if I carry a plastic bag on my forearm, I will still get a few hives on that arm.

Now, you have read all about my beginnings in the dental field, and how my exposure to mercury at work and in my own mouth had begun to affect my body and cause a variety of...