At this site you will find texts, links, abstracts related to mercury and
amalgam as environmental and health issues, and the facts, prejudices,
thoughts, ideas, that may be contained in them.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: Everything new will happen at the new site, however the information in place here will remain in this location until it is integrated into the new site. Links, boards and guestbook will not be maintained here. For contact, please use e-mail. Sorry for the inconvenience about non-working links.
Om du hoppas
på material på svenska om kvicksilver i miljön och amalgam i
munnen så finns det här nu!
Contents
- Guest Book
- Link above takes you to the guestbook of the new version of Mercury Page, as does the link at top of pages.
[Please take a minute to answer two questions and sign in to help me make
this a better place! You can also use this page for
comments.]
The boards are also changed and moved. Try the new version You see the idea and find the way from there. Links below are not working!
[If you want to make your comments public you can use the bulletin board
for
Mercury, an environmental issue with health aspects
, or
Amalgam, a health issue with environmental aspects.]
- Mercury Page (this page)
- What's the idea?
- An Introductory Rant
- What you will find, and how to find it
- What you will find
- How to find it
- Explanation of symbols
- WHAT'S NEW AND COMING?
Updated 95-12-19
- Resources
- Links to other sites of related interests; for other links try
my homepage).
- List of Abstracts
- Here you can browse the full list of titles, click on the title you find
interesting, and read the abstract.
- Lists of Abstracts Sorted According to Subject
- Approach
- On the sort order
- List of subjects
- Search abstracts and texts
- Hints on searching
- It is easy to use, so try it out!
- Search form
- Search a database of more than 3700 references on mercury and amalgam.
- The Science Page: What is Science?
- This is a parallell site to this one, and this is the place where my work on
the mercury and amalgam issues will show up as it proceeds. It will be
almost completely on line, and an open "cyber seminar" for anybody with an
interest in issues related to the project or parts of it. There will not be
any text only version!
My academic interest is focused on aspects of knowledge: its formation, its
growth, and its use (which is often substitutions for knowledge). Health
effects of mercury (environmentally as well as from amalgam), and of electro
magnetic fields are examples of areas where a kind of "knowledge game"
takes place. There are many actors on many scenes interacting in these games, and there are
winners and losers (the former writes the history in the end). At the
lower end there are a significant number of patients suffering and paying
the price for shortcomings in the knowledge growth needed to cope with
their situations, and that holds regardless from whether their symptoms are
caused by mercury or something else. Without the proper knowledge, there
is no proper treatment. The only measure there is for a proper treatment,
in a good sense, is that those suffering from illness gets well.
Comments and ideas on development of this page are most welcome (mail, make
your comment in the guest book, or on one of the bulletin boards if you
want to make it public).
I will try to keep an up to date list of
resources
. So far I've found very few. Please
mail and tell about what is missing.
Mercury is considered an environmental threat. The treating of seeds with
mercury, causing birds eggs to be so fragile, that breeding failed, was one
of the environmental hazards that started environmental concern through
Rachel Carson's famous book Silent Spring. In the 60s the Minamata accident
occured, with people being severely poisoned by excessive intake of mercury
refined through the food chain to poisonous levels in the fish feeding much
of the people living at the Minamata Bay in Japan.
A major constituent of amalgam used for tooth fillings is mercury. For
decades there has been a controversy whether amalgam affects health or
not. Although authorities in some countries now are taking actions to
reduce the use of amalgam, it's done with reference to "public concern",
and explicitly denying that amalgam could affect human health. This denial
is hold to be a "scientificly based" view by those forwarding it. However
the scientific community is devided, and the "public opinion" against
this "scientifically based" view is strong, viz. more and more people tend
to put their trust into "non-scientific" views.
The main argument against the possibility of harmful effects of amalgam is,
that there are no scientific studies that conclusively demonstrate that
amalgam is harmful. This argument is very interesting because
- it does not exclude indications of possible harmful effects, but treats
indications as meaningless;
- it takes the lack of knowledge as a positive proof of the correctness
of a prejudiced opinion.
Obviously these kinds of views are problematic, and you don't have to be a
scientist to realize at least some of the problems. What is forwarded as a
"scientifically based" view, and lacks positive support from research,
refutes any definition of science from within the scientific community
itself, as well as most versions of public understanding of what science
is or should be.
Those maintaining the "scientifically based" view of the human mouth as the
only safe place for deposit of mercury, have one very simple ground for
their argument, and that is the expertise they hold as scientists. They
know and have access to the knowledge matter there is on the subject, which
is not the case for "ordinary people". However "ordinary people" are
competent in sensing where arrogance replaces argument, and when lack of
knowledge is taken as scientific proof, they have their case. When this
happens, it is not the people in the scientific community demonstrating
arrogance in scientific disguise, who will pay the price, but science itself
that loses the public confidence it has relied on for so long. This might
be considered a self-induced counter productivity enterprise of science reaching
far out of the domains of the specific issues around which controversies arise.
Bo Walhjalt, updated 1995-12-19 e-mail:
bosse@vest.gu.se
