Care About Your Health and the Environment — Endorse Mercury-Free Dentistry
Throughout the country, a large percentage of the population has enough concern about their health to ensure that they encourage healthy habits, live a fit and active life and regular visit their doctors to prevent most of the usual health concerns that are prevalent in the country. There are quite a lot of pressing concerns in America like obesity, heart disease, diabetes and cancer, and for a large number of people, not falling prey to these problems take up all their time and effort at medical centers. In this ruckus, people often forget to care for a very important part of their body — the teeth.
While the teeth do receive some measure of neglect from time to time, they are in fact one of the most important parts of our body, serving a crucial functional need, adding shape and aesthetic appeal to faces and healthy smiles and contributing the personalities of people. Teeth need to be maintained properly for good health, and dental problems have the reputation of quickly turning extremely painful and expensive to treat. For this reason, it is best not to ignore your teeth, but instead to take care of it, scheduling visits with a local dentist every six months or once a year.
Going to the dentist regularly has the potential to solve most of your problems and prevent a lot of trouble in future, and there is just one more thing that you need to ensure, for the sake of your own health and that of the general environment — use only the services of a practitioner who provides mercury-free dentistry. Biocompatible dentistry, another broad name through which this is known, is the effort on the part of dental doctors to not use materials for treatment that have been known to have serious health and environmental impacts, and mercury has long been the most significant culprit in this regard.
What is Mercury-Free Dentistry, and Why Should You Care
To understand the basics of mercury-free dentistry, we have to take a small look at the history of a particular kind of dental treatment — tooth fillings. In the old days when dental treatment did not yet have the benefit of modern and enhanced technology that it was today, a substance called amalgam was the choice of material when it came to filling cavities in teeth, especially after procedures like the root canal treatment. The amalgam material, also called “silver filling”, a marketing gimmick of a misleading name which led most customers to believe that the main ingredient in the material was silver, was composed largely of mercury.
As is well known now, mercury is actually a dangerous, toxic substance with a number of significant bad effects. The mercury used in amalgam fillings back in the day would readily release the metal into the human body in vapor form, and the metal would also bioaccumulate with the passage of time, and this has caused a lot of damage in different ways. To start off with, the effect of mercury on the environment is extremely harsh, as it accumulates in the environment and affects the health of a number of different kinds of animals. It also makes its way into water, and can affect the safety of ground water and also cause fish and other aquatic life to die prematurely.
For humans, mercury is extremely toxic. It is a potent neurotoxin which can have a devastating effect on the human brain, resulting in a series of serious health issues and diseases. Their effect on children is especially strong, and for this reason, amalgam has given way slowly to better, safer and more inert alternatives when it comes to tooth filling. Unfortunately, it is still used in a number of places and its ill effects still keep ruining the lives of many people.
As a responsible citizen who cares about the health and wellness of humans and the environment, you should always check to see if the dentist you choose to visit practices mercury-free dentistry. This is a responsible move that can not only prevent you from being vulnerable to the toxic metal, but also help make the environment safer one step at a time.