Where can I get safe mercury amalgam removal?

Hi, Dr. Brady here. Wanna talk to you a little bit about a common question we get, which is silver filling safe. That’s a question they ask oftentimes. And, and silver fillings really have two problems with them, never. One, they do have mercury in them, which is, uh, obviously something dangerous. And number two, with time, they crack teeth. And what happens is the filling expands a little bit more than the tooth does. And so when we take a silver filling out, oftentimes the tooth is cracked underneath it. So really they, they have two, uh, strikes against them. But let’s talk about the mercury component a little bit, um, because the question often is, is how do I get them out safely? Well, um, we are really, uh, very, very picky about how that happens. Let me just show you one of the things that we have as a gas mask that I wear. Obviously the patient can’t wear it, but this is something to protect myself because if you, uh, know anything about taking silver fillings out or using silver fillings even to put them in or something like that, the dentist really is at risk. And so are anybody that walks into the office. When you take out a silver filling, it fills up the air, um, it becomes a part of the mist and is very dangerous. So even if you don’t have silver fillings in your mouth, if your dentist doesn’t take them out safely, you probably aren’t really safe being able to go in. So we take all kinds of precautions. We make sure that we have a rubber dam on you. We also make sure that we have this, one of these things that’s called a pitcher cancer. This is just half of it. And we have one that sits on one side of the room and it actually forms a magnetic arc and pulls away any of the mercury ions that come out of your mouth, pull ’em up and away from your body so that you won’t breathe them. We have a high speed vacuum, actually two, two high speed vacuums that will suck it all out and try to prevent it from getting anywhere near you. And so we cover you with a, a gown from top to bottom. We cover your eyes, we cover your nose, et cetera. We, we just don’t want you breathing any of that in. So that’s one of the things that we do. The next question is, if, so, after you take them out, what do you do with them? Well, it depends. We kind of have two choices. It depends on the size of the silver filling and it also depends on how many cracks we, I find when I get it out. If the tooth is really pretty well preserved and is too bad, no cracks, not very much recurrent decay around the filling, then it’s okay for us to put a regular filling back in. Except we use a composite resin filling. And this filling is, has no metal in it. There are only two brands that don’t have metal in them, and we use one of those too. Well, we actually use both of them. But uh, again, if you go to another dentist and have just a regular silver or regular composite filling put in, it probably has a little flex of metal in it. Uh, the next choice is a ceramic. A ceramic is very, very safe. It’s very, very strong. It’s the same thing that crowns are made of. We don’t always have to crown the tooth. In fact, I like to preserve as much tooth and as much enamel as I possibly can. And so we use either a ceramic inlay or a ceramic onlay to try to leave as much enamel so that the tooth can remain strong for you. So anyway, uh, we do our best to keep you very, very safe and try to keep you from breathing as much mercury as possible. So I’d love to see you and help you get rid of those sinks. Thank you for listening.