Shelby Township Dentist Explains an Amalgam Separator to Macomb County Dental Patients

Hi, I’m Dr. Heather Pranzarone Stratton at HPS Advanced Dental Care. We’re located in Shelby Township, Michigan. We get a lot of questions from our patients about mercury safe, mercury free environments. How we are mercury safe or mercury free for the dental patients, for ourselves, and how we relate that to the overall environment. I know a lot of people are concerned obviously as we all are, about how the things that we do affect the environment.

One of the things that we have at our dental office is what we call an amalgam separator. Actually in 2014, the state of Michigan has mandated that all dental offices have an amalgam separator on their water lines. We’ve had one for about 10 years now so we were kind of ahead of the curve on getting that amalgam separator in the office. That’s absolutely the thing that we want to do to keep the environment safe. It’s not only keeping the patients in the chair particularly safe, but it’s keeping all of us safe just living and breathing, and drinking the water, and the Great Lakes, and everywhere else.

When we use a suction, and we get the mercury, it goes down here into the water lines and it goes into the sewage and so on and so forth. All that mercury that was being suctioned out of people’s fillings was always just going directly into the water supply.

So many years ago, they came with something called Amalgam Separator. And it actually goes in our water lines. It’s in our basement of our building and somehow it separates the amalgam from the rest of the water supply. We then have a big canister that we send to a hazardous waste place that disposes that safely for us so that way none of that mercury is getting into our water lines.

Luckily, in 2014, now all dental offices need to have that on their water line, so that’s very, very good. But that is one way that we’re keeping the environment safe, because that’s obviously a concern with the mercury.

We do many things to keep our patients safe while they’re in the office. We also keep our staff safe, and myself safe so that we’re not breathing in that mercury vapor either. So we try to maintain a mercury free environment while we’re all in the building because I personally have a mercury sensitivity and I’m sure a lot of other people do too, especially after working in dentistry for as many years as we’ve been working in dentistry for.