From our sponsor Safeminds.

By Eric Uram

In my 50 plus years on this planet, I’ve been to the dentist about 100 times. Routine stuff mostly; I’ve never had the same degree of problems our first president did (George Washington had notoriously bad teeth). All the pearly whites you see in my mouth are mine. Those dental visits—along with good oral hygiene, a decent diet, and good genetics—have kept me from the need for false teeth.

Yet I still have mixed feelings about the several times I spent with a drill whining in my ear as the dentist prepared a tooth for restoration to fix the damage caused by decay that had attacked the surface and was destroying the tooth. Without such a fix that decay could have damaged the root and caused even bigger problems—like having no teeth.

But during my childhood, and for over a century, the preference has been for using “silver” fillings to replace areas in a damaged tooth. Silver amalgams have been used in dentistry since before the Civil War. And this shiny metal material the dentist inserts into the area the drill removed is problematic, to say the least.

I didn’t find out until ten years after I had my first cavity filled that “silver” material is actually comprised of about 50% mercury.

Read the full post at the Safeminds site.