JD,

While I fully agree with your opinion about mercury, there ARE some
situations where mercury works but other materials fail. Probably the
most common is with cracked teeth, where the poisonous mercury
continuously stops decay in the crack by gradually releasing
brain-destroying mercury for decades, but replacing them with composite
fillings simply causes the tooth to quickly rot out at the crack that is
beneath the composite once the mercury is gone. Of course, those cracks
probably came from corroding amalgams in the first place, but once the
teeth are cracked, you must either work with the cracks, pull the teeth,
or get used to abscesses.

A bunch of my lower teeth are cracked, which makes root canals pretty
much impossible without abscessing, and makes replacing amalgam fillings
with composite fillings rather ill advised. Often a crown will hold
things together, but you don't get to use pins to help hold them on
because a root canal will fail. Clearly, better technology is needed to
deal with cracked teeth, like maybe a gold band around the tooth to hold
it together or some such thing.

Hopefully, there is someone here with some of that better technology.

Steve Richfie1d

Back in the days before the patients all expected their fillings to be
white, I used the standard amalgam for posterior fillings. I had used
both the Schein Stratosphere and the Ionosphere, and they worked just
fine, without abnormal tarnish. In other words, they still looked
silver and shiny a year or two later.

I don't know how "make-your-own" capsules could be any better than
capsules carefully manufactured by established firms with experience in
the field.

Every dentist has seen both shiny silver and dark amalgam in patients'
old fillings, sometimes in the same mouth.

- dentaldoc

Your point is?

Ann