DR SHIKHA: Above all I do not specialize in particular therapies, but according to my own understanding, I am working with the people as a whole who consult me, as their physician. I am more beholden to my patients’ health and wellness interests than to any idea of my own ‘therapeutic specialization’. The health problems that I confront, despite their apparent variety, for the most part are caused by a general toxic overload. Functional medicine refers to this overload as the ‘total load’, in a person. For better understanding of what this infers, let me give you the medical dictionary definition, “The total load (n) is the sum of factors that influence an individual’s life and health, including food, chemicals, microbes, psychological factors and other elements. Any one of these factors would not normally cause illness, but the cumulative effect of these agents may overload the functioning of an individual.” Now, to address your question, the teeth are an important factor in the total load, especially when it comes to these terrible so-called ‘silver amalgam fillings’, which are actually highly toxic mercury amalgam more than anything else. It has been proven that such fillings continually, and over time severely, poison the system, which is why they are outlawed in some northern European countries, and shunned by the majority of dentists and patients in many more.
HH-BLOG: On what sources do you base your statement? I mean, lots of dentists in the US for example, but also here in India still use mercury fillings, actually putting them in patients’ mouths by the ten thousands every day.
DR SHIKHA: Unfortunately, yes. But of the sources you asked for, there are too many to mention them all. A good selection can be found through the worldwide web, for example at www.holisticmed.com/dental/amalgam. On the basis of these and other studies, the Swedish health authorities banned mercury fillings outright, whereas in Germany their use is curtailed severely. There was a doctor in Germany his name is Dr. Reinhard Voll, who after more than forty years of research and observation stated that, “Nearly 80% of all illness is related entirely or partially to problems in the mouth.” I cannot verify his findings, but it for sure makes for a provocative statement. Myself, I am inclined to approach the problem more from the ‘total load’ perspective. The health of the teeth is one factor of many, albeit one of the more important ones. There is no doubt that mercury escapes from amalgam fillings. Mercury vapor is poisonous and it gets into our system. Or why is it, do you think, that of all people tested dentists have the highest levels of residual mercury stored in their pituitary glands?
HH-BLOG: You used another word, and I am not sure of its significance: ‘functional medicine’. What does it mean? I never heard of it.
DR SHIKHA: It is the only approach that makes sense in terms of health management, but then present day health care isn’t much interested in health. It prefers the management of disease to the management of health.
HH-BLOG: I still don’t quite get what the words infer.
DR SHIKHA: Like Chinese medicine, or Ayurveda, or most other age-old medical traditions, functional medicine works on the premise that organ or other physical and psychological functions can be improved; that disease does not occur all of a sudden in the form of an unexpected system’s breakdown. Rather health and disease are a continuum, blending into each other. When a state of equilibrium is not maintained through appropriate diet, exercise and overall lifestyle, at first a function becomes slightly diminished, then more diminished, then severely compromised albeit still somewhat functioning; finally disease sets in. The point of functional medicine is that in most cases you can actually prevent the gradual slipping and sliding down into a diseased state by improving the system’s, or a particular organ’s function. As Frank Lipman M.D. aptly states, “This concept was never addressed in western medicine, you had either a healthy liver or a liver disease – nothing in-between. Western medicine offered no way to improve the function of the organs before they became diseased…” In other words, textbook allopathic medicine deals with a problem only once disease has set in. It ignores all the factors that slowly assemble and contribute to the formation of disease. On the other end of the spectrum of views, it is the aim of functional medicine to not let it come to that; or once disease has set in, to strengthen the overall and particular organ function rather than ‘annihilating’ the problem via a frontal assault.
HH-BLOG: And therefore you suggest the removal of mercury amalgam fillings as a preventive measure to strengthen the system’s function before these highly toxic irritants will wreak total havoc with a patient’s health? Is that what you are saying?
DR SHIKHA: Precisely. Removing mercury amalgam fillings reduces the ‘total load’, and thereby energizes and revitalizes the entire bodymind. It is an important aspect in anyone’s personal health management.
DR SHIKHA: Above all I do not specialize in particular therapies, but according to my own understanding, I am working with the people as a whole who consult me, as their physician. I am more beholden to my patients’ health and wellness interests than to any idea of my own ‘therapeutic specialization’. The health problems that I confront, despite their apparent variety, for the most part are caused by a general toxic overload. Functional medicine refers to this overload as the ‘total load’, in a person. For better understanding of what this infers, let me give you the medical dictionary definition, “The total load (n) is the sum of factors that influence an individual’s life and health, including food, chemicals, microbes, psychological factors and other elements. Any one of these factors would not normally cause illness, but the cumulative effect of these agents may overload the functioning of an individual.” Now, to address your question, the teeth are an important factor in the total load, especially when it comes to these terrible so-called ‘silver amalgam fillings’, which are actually highly toxic mercury amalgam more than anything else. It has been proven that such fillings continually, and over time severely, poison the system, which is why they are outlawed in some northern European countries, and shunned by the majority of dentists and patients in many more.
