What You Should Know Before Removing Mercury from Your Fillings

If you had fillings when you were a child, there’s a chance that your dentist used an amalgam material containing mercury to fill holes in your teeth. If so, you may have read about mercury fillings being bad for your health and want them removed.

At Bayside Dental Arts, Andrey Ilyabayev, DDS, and our team provide safe mercury removal and can replace your amalgam fillings with porcelain or ceramic fillings that match the color of your teeth and can beautify your smile while reducing your risk of mercury exposure.

Mercury amalgam fillings

Dental amalgam is made of nearly equal parts of a powder containing silver, tin, copper, zinc and other metals, and liquid mercury. This amalgam is strong and long-lasting, and it was the gold standard for fillings for many years.

But mercury can escape the amalgam slowly over time, usually in the form of a vapor. The Food and Drug Administration has recognized concerns about mercury exposure.

While most people wouldn’t be adversely affected by having a few mercury fillings, multiple fillings can cause excess mercury to show up in blood or urine and could pose a threat to people in certain categories, including:

• Women planning to become pregnant, pregnant women, and developing fetuses
• Nursing women and breastfed newborns and infants
• Children younger than 6
• People with a preexisting neurological disease 
• People who have impaired kidney function
• People with an allergy to any ingredient in the amalgam  

While the number of fillings containing mercury has dropped precipitously over the past five years (plummeting 73% in the five-year span between 2017 and 2022 alone), many people who still have mercury fillings from their youth are concerned about the risks.

Mercury amalgam removal

Getting mercury fillings replaced isn’t as simple as a visit to any dentist’s office to have the filling taken out and a new, mercury-free one installed. 

Removing amalgam fillings can also release mercury vapor, so getting rid of amalgam by traditional waste disposal also poses an environmental hazard.

At Bayside Dental Arts, we’ve invested in equipment and training to ensure we safely remove your mercury amalgam. A special ventilation system sucks vapors up and away from you and the dentist and traps them. We then dispose of the amalgam safely using hazardous material containers.

The entire process to remove your mercury fillings can take up to 60-90 minutes. Then we install new fillings made of a neutral material such as porcelain or ceramic that matches your current tooth color.

Do you want to get rid of mercury amalgam fillings? Schedule a consultation by calling us at Bayside Dental Arts, or book an appointment online. Our New York office is located in Bayside, Queens.