Teeth can work like little batteries. Metal in the mouth produces electrical fields around certain teeth which can produce many bizarre effects. American holistic dentist Hal Huggins used to show slides of teeth that had been cut open to show the scorch marks they contained where electrical currents had been running for many years.
This effect is hardly surprising when you consider that, with every filling in your mouth, there are two or more metals and a saltwater fluid medium (saliva). This is exactly how Allessandro Volta’s original batteries were made, and the battery in your current motorcar is essentially the same thing.
The trouble starts because of the fact that electrical currents leach the mercury out of the teeth through an effect called ‘electrolysis’, where damage is due to the passage of a galvanic (unidirectional) electrical current. This is why some patients complain of a constant metallic taste in the mouth, which is made worse by hot fluids and salty food (as these create more electrolysis). Most worrying, electrolysis is capable of releasing deadly mercury vapour, which goes straight to the brain tissue, where it is highly invasive and toxic.
Nevertheless, as potentially damaging as mercury in the mouth is the electricity itself. When testing teeth for electrical effects, I have seen momentary spikes of up to one volt – enough to light a small torch or flashlight. It’s worth remembering that the currents generated by amalgams are formed very close to the brain, which ordinarily operates at far lower potentials (only a few millivolts). The brain lies only a few millimetres from the jaw bone, where the roots of the teeth are inserted, just on the other side of the thin cranial bone and the meninges (the three membranes enveloping the brain and spinal cord). This kind of current can cause mental dysfunction, which I often find in clinical practice.
One patient of mine, a 44-year-old woman with Meniere’s disease, also suffered from vertigo and vomiting, with intermittent staggering (so-called sailor’s gait). She couldn’t think clearly any more, and had trouble with her memory and eyesight. These mental problems, plus a constant pain in the nape of the neck, left her unable to work. But as her doctors could find no clinical explanation, she was told it was all in her head – which in a way was true. When a brain tumour was suspected, tests were required to exclude this grim possibility.
Eventually, a surgeon referred her to Dr Helmut Raue, an electroacupuncture specialist who understands biological dentistry. He measured her teeth for galvanic currents and found a 215-microampere current between a gold filling and a nearby amalgam. A week after she had the amalgam removed, all pain had disappeared, and her balance had returned to normal.
As patients usually don’t consult their dentist when they experience symptoms such as headache, facial neuralgia, dizziness, sleep disorders and digestive disturbances, such cases don’t often come to light.
Energetic fields
Besides simple battery problems, electroacupuncture practitioners are finding teeth as transmitting foci to be a common cause of energetic disturbance. The problem is much more complicated than it might at first seem.
Several key acupuncture meridians cross the line of the teeth as they pass over the face. An abscess or ‘transmitting focus’ can create pathological effects anywhere along the meridian. As these meridians are connected to secondary organs and other sites, problems with a front incisor may have an impact on the kidneys as the kidney meridian passes through the incisor teeth. The kidneys, in turn, are related to the knee joints. With patients who have incisor problems or a bridge at this location, I always surprise them by asking about the arthritis in their knees, which they invariably have.
The consequences of these interconnections are sometimes very surprising indeed. In one case, a dentist had prepared a crown prosthesis, the type that uses a nickel post that fits in a hole drilled down the centre of the tooth to give it support. As the post was being inserted in the right upper jaw, the patient let out a squeal: she had gone blind in the right eye. When the dentist removed the crown, she could see again. When he then put it back on, she went blind again. This was repeated several times, after which she refused the crown and had the tooth removed.
What is important about this striking example of what we might call ‘virtual dentistry’ is how instantaneous the reaction was. For this reason, it could not have resulted from a chemical or even metal toxicity. Allergies to nickel are not uncommon but, clearly, it would take time to develop and become manifest. The sudden loss of the patient’s vision indicated a clear neurological dysfunction along the optical pathways due to a field disturbance, probably at the quantum level.
This story makes vividly clear what risks we take when we allow metal into our mouths. The resulting disturbance of the body’s energy field can have unpredictable and serious consequences. If this woman had not lost her vision immediately, but had gone blind over the subsequent few weeks, it is a near-certainty that the correct cause would never have been diagnosed. She would likely have ended up undergoing harmful and unnecessary interventions, all of which would fail because they were not correcting the real problem.
Dr Keith Scott-Mumby
This is part two of the hidden effects of dentistry on your health (see WDDTY vol 14 no 2 for part one). Dr Mumby is the author of Virtual Medicine (Thorsons, 1999), which includes methods of draining metals from your mouth.