Macomb County Dentist Talks About Safe Mercury Removal at Her Dental Practice in Shelby Township

Hi, I’m Dr. Heather Pranzarone Stratton at HPS Advanced Dental Care. We’re located in Macomb County, Michigan. I wanted to talk a little bit today about safe mercury removal. We know about silver fillings sometimes called amalgams, or mercury fillings. A lot of people call them different things. Some people call them the black fillings in their mouth. They have at least 50% of mercury in them. The ADA still is maintaining that they’re perfectly safe.

For me personally, I know that I have a higher mercury level in my body than I should. So, because of that we take all the precautions that we can at our office that are recommended by the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology to make sure that we have a safe, mercury free environment at our office, as best as we can do that.

So we get a lot of questions from dental patients about what this machine is over here when they come in, because it’s always in our rooms when we’re working on patients. So people who are new to the practice will say, what’s this crazy thing? We usually make jokes about it. We say, you know, snuffleupagus or whatever, but basically this is a specially made air purifier that has 5 layers of air filters in the bottom part of it.

When removing amalgam (mercury fillings) this actually sits by your mouth and removes a significant amount of any mercury vapor that’s present. It also purifies the air for bacteria, viruses and it reduces the amount of splatter that occurs. So this is a really great addition that we made to the practice probably about 4 years ago now.

Here is another thing that we do to keep you safe when we’re removing mercury filings. Obviously these are not real teeth, they’re a little bigger than real teeth. But the traditional dental suction when you had fillings done before looks kind of like this. Obviously it’s attached to the suction device, but this is what it looks like. Usually we’re suctioning by the teeth to get the vapor and the particles gone. What we have at our office is a special suction designed just for mercury removal and this suction actually goes around the tooth. These are obviously bigger than regular teeth, but this suction goes around the tooth like this so that when we’re removing the filling, all of the filling and particles go into this special suction.This suction is about 200 times more effective, it’s been shown, than this suction at removing mercury vapor and mercury particles.

So we take other precautions as well when we’re removing mercury fillings but these are the two biggest ones that we’ve noticed that people ask questions about. So that’s what those two pieces of equipment are and that’s what they’re used for. They help keep dental patients safe, in case you do know that you have any sort of mercury toxicity that your doctor or physician has told you about, like my doctor told me about.