Shelby Township Dentist Discusses Safe Mercury Removal
Hi. I’m Dr. Heather Pranzarone Stratton at HPS Advanced Dental Care. We’re located in Shelby Township, Michigan. And we see patients from all over the tri-county area in Macomb, Oakland and Wayne Counties.
I want to talk a little bit today; we have a lot of questions recently about, the difference between safe mercury removals, which would be the silver feelings that you have in your mouth. Those are called amalgams, mercury fillings, and silver fillings. What we do know about those fillings is they contain about 50% mercury. Some of our patients that call us have been told by their physicians that they might need to have those fillings removed, because they might have an over-abundance of mercury in their system. It’s called mercury toxicity. They call us and they ask us, do you remove amalgam or mercury safely in your office. There’s been a little bit of confusion, it seems, amongst patients, about what that actually means.
I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about safe mercury removal practices. We follow the IOT’s guidelines on safe mercury removal out of your teeth, and out of your body, and out of the office.
There’s a many step process that we take in order to do that to make sure we’re safe, you’re safe, that my team is safe. Some people ask, well is that what an amalgam separator is for?
An amalgam separator is a little bit different than the protocol that we use at our office. We also use an amalgam separator. The amalgam separator keeps the environment safe. An amalgam separator is something that hooks onto our water lines that we’ve had for years and years now, probably almost 10 years we’ve had an amalgam separator on our water lines. When we take that filing out of your tooth, it goes into our suction, and then it goes into the water lines. It goes into the sewer and it goes out into the lakes. We don’t want that mercury leeching out into the lakes, because we don’t want that getting into our fish and everything else. So, what we have is something called an amalgam separator. It hooks onto our water lines; it’s a specialized filter that removes the mercury out of the water.
We then take that special filter, send it to a company that disposes of that mercury properly. An amalgam separator is a fantastic thing to have. Actually, I think in 2014, the State of Michigan is mandating that everybody, every dental office has one on their water lines. Like I said, we’ve had one for 10 years. It’s great for the environment. An amalgam separator’s a fantastic thing to have. It does not keep.
You however save as the patient in the chair to remove that mercury, to keep you safe from any mercury exposure at that point. So if you do need your fillings out, because you’ve been told by your physician or something that you have a lot of mercury in your system. We also have another protocol besides that separator that will keep you safe while you’re in the chair.
Shelby Township Dentist Discusses Safe Mercury Removal
If you have any questions about that protocol, and exactly what we do, like I said it’s a many step process. This would be a very long video that we, we use. If you want to give our office a call, its 248 652 0024, we’d be happy to explain it to you. Thank you.
