Testing for Mercury When you first start thinking you could be mercury poisoned, you think about having a heavy metals test. I went to a local chiropractor but he didn't have a test in his office. He fooled around, wasted my time, and finally told me he couldn't help me. But he didn't tell me anyone I could see who could test me. Moral of the story: Don't go to doctors who know nothing about mercury! Emergency rooms are useless I called my local ER and asked to be tested for mercury toxicity and when they found out I thought I could be poisoned from my dental fillings, I was told "you can't be poisoned from dental fillings, and we don't do this test." Urine challenge testing I found an alternative health doctor belonging to www.acam.org who gave me a urine challenge test using 500 mg of DMSA, but my levels never did show very high for mercury, since I was not excreting mercury at that time. However, my doctor treated me for mercury toxicity based on my clinical symptoms. I did show high levels of other toxic metals in the urine challenge test. I took the 500 mg of DMSA to challenge the mercury to come out into my urine and I didn't seem to have any bad effects from it. However, DAMS does not recommend a urine challenge test with a chemical like DMSA with mercury still in the teeth. Some people have severe effects when using mercury chelators in testing. The most dangerous challenge test is the IV of DMPS. This will dump huge amounts of mercury out of your cells into your kidneys. Some people have kidney damage after this. www.dmpsbackfire.org. Very aggressive doctors using this test can make you very sick. Urine challenge tests only measure how much mercury your body is able to excrete into your urine. It does not measure your body's burden of mercury. If mercury does show up high, it means you are poisoned. If it does not show up high, it could mean you are not poisoned or it could mean you are poisoned. This test is not valid when you are not excreting mercury. Hair Analysis You can do a hair analysis using the counting rules of the chemist Andy Cutler who recommends a specific test from Doctor's Data in Chicago. This will not show high levels of mercury, but will show mineral derangement from mercury in your body. You can find information for this test at http://home.earthlink.net/~moriam/HOW_TO_hair_test.html. If you do not want to do this by yourself, Dr. Alan Greenberg, a neurologist from Maryland, will help you do the hair test, apply Andy's counting rules to this test, and advise you on its results. His web site is http://www.scienceformulas.com. Urine Porphyrin Testing Dr. Boyd Haley, chemistry department, University of Kentucky, recommends the urine porphyrin test. This is explained in the article, Urine Porphyrin Test and you send your urine to Paris, France. It is a "non-invasive, safe, and accurate mercury toxicity test," according to Leo Cashman, Executive Director of DAMS. Don't test at all However, you have another choice. Don't test at all, especially if you have limited funds. If you have exhausted all your roads trying to find out why you are ill, if you became sick after having dental work done, if your dentist exposed you to mercury vapor drilling out fillings, if you have the metallic taste from dissimilar metals in your mouth, if everything else is ruled out.........just accept the fact you are probably poisoned and you want to reduce your further exposure to mercury vapor. Concentrate on finding a good safe biological dentist to remove your fillings, and save your money for the safe removal of your dental fillings. Use your money for dental work, supplements and detox agents and seeing an alternative health doctor. It is a good thing to safely remove mercury dental fillings and go through detoxification in order to prevent health problems or to keep your health problems from getting worse. However, removing your dental fillings will not guarantee that all your health problems will disappear. But keeping your toxic fillings, crowns, bridgework and root canals, if you are sick from the mercury, means in all likelihood, you will get worse and keep developing new symptoms and new diseases. If you get so sick you can no longer work, then you may not have any health insurance to do the dental work, or have enough money to pay out of pocket for alternative health doctors. Safely remove the fillings before they destroy your life and livelihood. Back to the top Back to Mercury Poisoned main page