The right of every patient to make decisions about their own bodies — including what filling material is implanted in their teeth — is enshrined in laws, policies and resolutions throughout the world.

In the video below Charlie Brown, executive director of Consumers for Dental Choice and former attorney general for West Virginia, explains the importance of choosing a mercury-free dentist.

 This right is particularly important when it comes to making decisions about your teeth because amalgam dental fillings are 50 percent mercury — a toxin that causes problems for the following:

• Your health: Dental amalgam releases neurotoxic mercury vapor into your body. Children, the unborn and the hypersensitive are especially vulnerable to the toxic effects of mercury.

As if that's not bad enough, as a pre-Civil War concoction, amalgam requires the removal of healthy tooth tissue, weakens tooth structure and could therefore crack teeth — leading to much higher dental bills later.

• Your environment: Dental amalgam is the largest amount of mercury in use in the United States — more than light bulbs, or thermometers, or batteries.

Most of this mercury ends up polluting our air, soil and water, where it can contaminate the fish we eat. Mercury pollution can cause health problems, especially for children and the unborn.

• Your dental office: Because mercury is the most vaporous of the heavy metals, dental amalgam pollutes the dental workplaces full of toxic air — which exposes dentists, dental hygienists, dental assistants and front office staff to eight to 10 hours of dangerous breathing every work day.

A clinic where the dentists regularly place amalgam is a hazardous workplace — but whose hazards are generally left unexplained to the dental staffs, even the pregnant women, which can and does have serious and horrible consequences to the reproductive systems of young women.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YImUIWTUK28