President's Message

When I received what was then the latest edition of The Merck Manual, the compendium of differential diagnosis and treatment in internal medicine, I discovered that this centenary edition included a facsimile of the first publication printed in 1899. Recently, out of curiosity, I went to the index of that slender volume and counted 19 different mercury compounds listed for various therapeutic applications. Opening to the index in the 1999 edition, I found only one entry for mercury: Mercury Toxicity. Yet, the American Dental Association, in the manner of a strong trade organization, holds onto this 170-year-old technology through ignorance, deceit and denials.

How can it be that the medical profession has totally removed mercury from its pharmacopoeia in the past 100 years, even belatedly beginning to eliminate thimerosal, the ethyl-mercury preservative, from vaccines, while the dental profession is not far removed from the medieval practice our dental forefathers of shaving silver coins into elemental mercury?

Is it not, therefore, hypocritical of the JAMA to publish the severely flawed children’s amalgam trial (which I refer to as the children’s mercury exposure experiments)? How ironic that the AMA that expresses such concern about mercury in the environment and rejects its use in any form of medication, feels that it finds “safe haven” in the mouths of our patients.

To stretch the time line of one of Dr. Boyd Haley’s aphorisms: “is this what it’s like to have a 170-year-long argument with the town drunk?”

Opinion’s of IAOMT President Terrence Messerman <TMesserman@aol.com>