Magnetic Susceptibility of Dental Amalgams

Good point. I see a huge fallacy in this measurement (quoted from the Dutch report):

The potentials they are measuring are not decoupled from the human body and are dominated by effects from countless other naturally occuring electrical impulses present in the body. The only conclusion to be drawn is that the human body's potential varies with time, regardless of the presence of amalgams. The potential due to the amalgam cannot be determined robustly based on the methodology presented in the paper.

Lots of other people have measured amalgam potentials too.

Here's an abstract by a couple who published their findings:

" Nilner K, Holland RI.

The potentials of 407 amalgam restorations have been determined in vivo. The measurements were performed with very high impedance equipment, and relative to a Ag/AgCl reference electrode. The readings varied from -23 mV to -595 mV, with 90% of the readings confined to within -127 mV to -431 mV and a mean value of -226.1 mV. Of the restorations, 394 were measured twice, and no significant difference could be found between the first and the second reading. During the study, eight new restorations were inserted. Their potentials varied from -180 mV to -565 mV, with a mean of -339.4 mV, which was significantly lower than that of the older restorations.

PMID: 3862235 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] "

From:

That's over half a volt.

If the electrical potentials generated by amalgam fillings are "not decoupled from the human body", then experimental investigations to determine whether or not these potentials are able to dissipate electrical energy through the human neorological system should have been carried out.

The resting potential of a human nuerological synapse has a magnitude of only 70mV.

That's quite small compared with 595mV.

I wonder if you might be following (perhaps unwittingly) the Peter Sheridan(*) school of "scientific" thinking which says something like:

"Hey fellas, I've explained how nobody really understands what's being measured here - SO WE CAN JUST IGNORE THE MEASUREMENTS!"

Which is no kind of scientific thinking at all.

It's just rank stupidity.

The neurological synapses in the nerve fibres running to and from a child's teeth have resting potentials with magnitudes of just 70mV.

And the electrical potentials generated by amalgam dental fillings, which continue to be placed in children's teeth, have been measured with magnitudes of more than 500mV.

I belive that experimental investigations to determine whether or not these potentials are able to dissipate electrical energy through the nerves in people's heads should therefore have been carried out.

And I am confident that I am right.

Keith P Walsh

(*) see:

ok, have you done an exhaustive search of all publications to show where they have been done? if they should have been carried out, then someone must have already done it. i'm sure some grad student somewhere over all the years that amalgam has been used must have had the same thought, so go find the thesis, the published paper, the draft that never got reviewed... if it should have been done, then it must be out there somewhere!

prove it. find the research. or if you can't do that, do it yourself, or commision someone to do it for you. but just stating that it should have been done won't make it so.... especially in a usenet news group. all it does is make you look like an incompetent paranoid conspiracy monger who can't do the science themselves and wants someone to hand them the answer they want to hear on a silver platter. it ain't going to happen.

There are far more electrical processes than the firing of synapses going on. As an example, just hold the two leads of a voltmeter in your hands and you will see voltages all over the map, just as strong as what the Dutch guys measured. The Dutch experiment is measuring V(amalgam) + V(body), where V(body) is a highly time dependent, essentially unpredictable quantity. The Dutch did not do the work to **coherently** decouple these two values, especially when theory predicts V(amalgam) = 0.

Here is a direct analogy to the fallacy that I pointed out: turn on a tv and use a volt meter to measure the potential across some random resistor on one of the tv's circuit boards. Claiming that this non-zero potential is due to active power generation in the resistor is pure junk and is no different than what the Dutch guys are doing by measuring the potential between an amalgam and some point in the oral cavity. If back in my grad school days you were in my EE circuits lab, you would have gotten an F for making conclusions based on such a clearly unsound circuit diagnostic approach.

I've looked for it.

I've asked the American Dental Association if they know of any such research.

And it appears that they don't.

It appears that there is no scientific evidence to indicate that the electrical potentials generated by amalgam dental fillings are not able to dissipate electrical energy through the nerves in people's heads.

Enquiries concerning the electrical behavior of dental amalgams can be found at:

reviewed...

where? how many universities, how many libraries, how many medical and dental society publications? over what time period? you said it should have been carried out, so go find who did it! you can't be the first to have this idea.

yeah, great. one association that is an organization of dentists... in your paranoid conspiracy theory mind would you really expect they would give you any information that might discredit their member's practices?????

'it appears'??? either they know of it or they don't... and if they don't it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, just that they are ignorant of it. and i'll bet you didn't even get past the first layer that only knows what is in their little handouts that sit in piles in their waiting room.

sounds like a double negative to me. 'no evidence' the are 'not able' doesn't mean they 'are able'.

yeah, a couple 10 year old unsigned short letters making unsupported claims sent to who? and ignored by how many? and you still don't have an answer so you keep asking the same open ended question on usenet trolling for believers.

First you should back up and admit that there is no scientific evidence that amalgams generate electrical potentials in the first place. Junk science can only lead to junk conclusions.

Agree, and he is taking as a given so many assumptions which are simply false.

Oh I have heard it thousands of times ~ wait a minute, its all from Keith!

Strangely enough, just now on the Discover Channel program, Mythbusters, they measured a few millivolts being generated between gold and amalgam in a solution of vinegar and water with the same PH as a human mouth. They were trying to prove or disprove that Lucille Ball once received, as she claimed, WWII Japanese Morse code through her fillings.

I said it once, I'll say it again, if you can hook me up with free XM Radio by getting some of these Extra-Mercury Fillings in my mouth, I want 'em!

SG

XM radio requires exactly 745.190372 mV potential in your mouth, so make sure you get it done by a top notch dentist who specializes in hifi installation.

I've only seen two episodes of that show.

The first episode that I saw, they were unable to make a workable ice bullet and concluded that it couldn't be done, but logic doesn't work that way. In order to prove that something can't be done, not only must your experiment fail, but you must also prove that there is no better way to make the attempt.

Their attempt was super lame. They were oblivious to the concept of making clear ice. It looked as if they didn't know any more about ice, than what you could glean from drinking soda pop.

In the other episode that I saw, the question was, "does a microwave cook food from the inside?" Somehow they thought they could do this, without comparing differential temperatures between the inside and outside of food cooked in microwave and food cooked by convection or conduction.

Samuel F.B. Morse was Japanese?

Not by an alt.radio.frequency.amalgam.installer ......

In message , Joel M. Eichen D. D. S. writes

Samuel F.B. Morse was alive during WWII?

My ARRL Handbook lists "Morse Codes for Other Languages", Japanese, Thai, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, & Greek.

Yup at least he was according to the internet. By the way, how do you translate Japanese alphabet into dots and dashes?

JOEL