A five-year-old silver filling contains 27 percent mercury instead of the 50 percent it started with. A twenty-year-old filling can contain less than 5 percent. Nearly half the mercury has departed within five years, and the person carrying the filling is where it went. Autopsy work published in the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry found brain mercury concentrations correlating linearly with the number of amalgam surfaces in the mouth. A Bacharach industrial mercury detector held above the fillings of a university psychologist in ordinary conversation registered 90 micrograms per cubic meter of air. OSHA closes a workplace and issues a $10,000 fine at 51. The 1993 book It’s All in Your Head: The Link Between Mercury Amalgams and Illness sets out this evidence across twenty years of clinical work with over 7,000 patients. Double-blind testing of 3,500 of them returned reactivity to mercury in 90.2 percent of the patients tested. The American Dental Association’s official position, published in Science Digest in 1984, put the figure at 5 percent. Within a month it had been revised to 1 percent. By 1989 it stood at one in a million. By 1991 it was back to 3 percent. No supporting studies were cited for any of these numbers.
Hal A. Huggins received his dental degree from the University of Nebraska in 1962 and practiced conventional dentistry for the next eleven years, ghostwriting Atlas of Occlusal Analysis with Arne Lauritzen and lecturing internationally on blood chemistry and nutrition. His encounter with the mercury question came in 1973 at a Mexico City conference, when Brazilian dentist Olympio Pinto explained that certain blood chemistry abnormalities Huggins could not account for resulted from sulfhydryl blockage by mercury leaching from amalgam fillings. Pinto’s own master’s thesis on mercury toxicity at Georgetown University had been shut down a decade earlier by the National Institute of Dental Research, which forced the university to stop the work. Huggins spent the next twenty years documenting what Pinto had described. He returned to the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs at age 48 to study under experimental pathologist Douglas Swartzendruber, completing a master’s degree in 1989 with a thesis titled “The Medical and Legal Implications of Components of Dental Materials.” He founded the Huggins Diagnostic Center in 1990. By the early 1990s the center was receiving 5,000 calls per month. Robert Atkins, M.D., wrote the foreword.
The mercury fight was already 150 years old when the book appeared. In the 1830s and 1840s, the National Association of Dental Surgeons banned amalgam as unethical. When half the profession used it anyway, the organization disintegrated. The American Dental Association was founded in 1899 to replace it, and it endorsed amalgam from its first meeting. In the 1920s, German chemist Alfred Stock published over thirty scientific articles documenting mercury toxicity from fillings using research methods that rival the sophistication of any 1990s laboratory. The dental community attacked him personally. His laboratory was destroyed by a bombing raid in World War II, and he died in near obscurity. In the same decade, Weston Price served as director of research for the ADA for fourteen years and published extensively on the dangers of root-filled teeth. His work is now nearly impossible to find. Huggins wrote in 1993 into an environment in which the ADA was still telling the public that reactivity to mercury was rare. The new high-copper amalgams releasing mercury fifty times faster than earlier formulations were being sold as state-of-the-art. Young women were ending up in wheelchairs within three years of MS diagnosis instead of the twenty years it had taken a generation earlier. Nearly one million mercury fillings were being placed by American dentists every day.
The book belongs to the toxic-exposure lineage in the terrain canon, the tradition that traces named diseases to specific documented environmental sources. Huggins is a convergent witness. He works within the establishment’s own methodology and vocabulary, using clinical blood chemistry, laboratory reactivity testing, and porphyrin excretion assays to demonstrate that conditions medicine classifies as “autoimmune” frequently trace to a single toxic material placed in the mouth by trained professionals under regulatory endorsement. The full summary unpacks the four-question framework by which the case was built; the sequential removal protocol that raised response rates from 10 percent to over 50 percent by taking negative-current fillings out first; the calcium-manganese-mercury triad found in hair analysis of the toxic patient; the mechanism by which Streptococcus mutans, the bacterium living in every mouth, converts mercury into methyl mercury on the fillings themselves; and the case of eleven-year-old Susan, given three months to live with seizures every fifteen minutes, who walked downstairs on Christmas morning five days after her three small pit fillings were removed. In all states except California, a dentist who tells a patient any of this can lose the license he spent eight years training for.
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