You're beginning to sound desperate Paul.
The reason why I keep returning to these newsgroups with the same old questions is because those questions have never been answered.
I recognise that people like you and Jim Pennino are able to convince yourselves that you have answered my questions, but you are mistaken. All you ever do is simply make up excuses for ignoring them because you don't know what the answers are.
Olin Perry Norton even appeared to have convinced himself that he had conclusively dealt with my questions by asking me one of his own which I couldn't answer!
How obtuse is that!?
Some of the earliest questions I posted to sci.med.dentistry were concerned with the physical properties of dental amalgams, and why it appears that properties such as their electrical conductivity and magnetic susceptibility had ever been measured. And those questions are still not resolved today.
I still bother to check. (I doubt very much whether any of you guys ever do.) And on a recent search I found a paper with the following title:
"Magnetic susceptibility and electrical conductivity of metallic dental materials and their impact on MR imaging artifacts"
- the summary of which can be seen at:
As it happens, two of those alloys do have some mercury in them - Starfill NG2 (3% Hg) and Ana 2000 Duet (2% Hg). However, despite their mercury content, these materials are NOT amalgams. They are ALLOYS. Dentists will appreciate perfectly well that you can't make amalgams with those proportions of mercury. These materials would have been formed by mixing ALL of the constituents (Ag 70%, CU 15%, Hg 3%, Sn
12%; and; Ag 43%, Cu 25.4%, Hg 2%, Sn 29.6%, respectively) in their molten states, i.e. at a temperature well above room temperature, and then allowed to cool at controlled rate.The other "amalgams" tested, i.e. those with 0% mercury content, were not amalgams either, they too were ALLOYS (Safargam Plus, Safargam NG2, Safargam Special and Ana 70 Duett).
These alloys are purposely formulated for use in amalgams. It may make sense therefore to refer to them by the term "amalgam alloys", in which term the word "amalgam" serves as an adjective.
But they are NOT amalgams. And in the physical world, regardless of what anyone calls them, they do not accurately represent the physical composition of any material that would be found in anyone's mouth in the form of an amalgam dental filling.
The discovery of this paper therefore does not answer any of my questions regarding the physical properties of amalgam fillings.
On the contrary, it raises more questions.
Such as, if someone can get a Phd measuring the electrical and electromagnetic properties of the alloys used for mixing amalgams, why hasn't anyone bohered to do the same with samples of actual amalgams (i.e. after the alloys have been turned into powder and mixed with liquid mercury to form the actual amalgams which are placed in peopl's teeth.)?
The same paper also presents the results of measurements for a range of other metal alloys, those used for crowns, bridges, braces, etc,.
So we have the properties of electrical conductivity and magnetic susceptibility for just about every type of metallic material that dentists place in people's mouths, and for the ALLOYS used for mixing amalgams, but NOT for the mixed amalgams themselves.
And with regard to the actual amalgams themselves, i.e. as they appear in people's teeth, we are still ignorant.
How do you explain that?
And don't tell me that it's up to me to do the measurements myself.
That's just the same old excuse that you always use simply to avoid the question.
Keith P Walsh