WHAT HAPPENS WHEN MEDICINE FAILS US?

Margorie's story

We’ve added a new section! In Personal Stories we step around theory and vision-making to capture real life experiences. Some stories will point to the pain of our current paradigm, some to the hope that healing journeys can bring, and some will attempt to peer into a future built around Living Well Locally.

For this first post we thank a good friend in Tennessee for allowing us to share her personal story of struggle within America’s current medical and dental paradigm.

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Marjorie is 85 years old and from a family with long-lived genes. This would be good if she really wanted to keep living, but some days she does not. For thirty years she has largely confined herself to home and now spends all of her days and nights in bed. Leaving home is an arduous task done only for doctor visits, which, for all this time, has provoked wildly mixed emotions.

Since having breast implants removed in the mid-1990’s and giving up on wearing painful dentures, Marjorie has preferred the lonely quiet and social safety of her home. Her one child, a son, manages her care from his home in another state and, being now retired, comes to give direct care for a week each month. Although her sisters make sporadic, well-intended contact from homes far away, Marjorie’s sense of alienation from most of her family has only grown over time; her long illness has fostered a persistent feeling of being misbelieved and misunderstood.

Public awareness of harm from implants and dental amalgams has been extremely slow to penetrate American culture. It existed only among a few professionals and within small support groups during the pre-internet days when Margorie worked so hard to understand her failing health. She kept herself alive by reading the works of researchers, dentists, physicians, and others who inhabit that rare realm of curiosity and investigation into why illness happens. Back then, their findings were only found in printed papers and books; there were no easy-to-access website postings.

How could Marjorie’s friends and family understand what she was going through when their own mouths held ‘silver’ fillings (50% mercury), when dentists continued to place them, and when their doctors were not aware of the harm? This failure of modern medicine and dentistry adds greatly to the feelings of so many patients like Marjorie who feel misunderstood and disbelieved, and even alienated from those around them.

In the late 1980’s, Marjorie began a local support group as part of a national organization educating consumers about the dangers of dental amalgam. She worked to give her local community - professionals and patients - information about the dangers of mercury in amalgam fillings. It was not an easy task in those pre-internet days, and still is not today, despite regulators now acknowledging the issue.

On September 24, 2020, an FDA safety communication finally admonished the use of amalgam for ‘high-risk’ populations, including children, women who breastfeed or plan to become pregnant, people with pre-existing neurological conditions or kidney impairments. Some progress toward awareness is finally being made.

For those like Marjorie, however, who have worked long and hard as volunteers, this ruling did not go far enough. But it was a step toward acknowledging what the American Dental Association for 150 years has been refusing to accept - that mercury can vaporize from dental fillings, move into the oral cavity, be absorbed through the GI tract, and impact susceptible organs.

Margorie did her best to help others learn this painful truth even as she was going from dentists to doctors and back again searching for solutions to her own unresolved health issues: chronic fatigue, depression, heightened emotional sensitivity, a constantly burning mouth, and Sjogren’s (dry mouth). Mercury ‘tattoos’ on her gums, dentures that could never be properly fitted, lead contamination in her ‘pure gold’ crowns . . . her faith in even the people trying to help her was sometimes shaken. Finally she gave up on having any teeth at all.

And yet, still another danger lurked inside her body. After breastfeeding her son in the mid-1960’s, Marjorie had gotten silicone breast implants. In 1968, there were few toxicity warnings from doctors or regulators about silicone or other implant materials, just as there had not been with the mercury in dental amalgam. What Margorie would discover in the early 1990’s was that implants can rupture and their contents leach into the body. She joined a class-action lawsuit against Dow Corning and won some compensation, but this did little to help remove her high levels of toxins and the damage that had been done; at that time, no one knew how.

As she began to warn others also about breast implants, Marjorie discovered that this issue, like amalgam, was a hard sell, not only to friends and family but to the many doctors she consulted about her symptoms. There was simply not enough time in typically brief visits to explain both her symptoms and her history with implants and amalgams; she left most appointments with little help and an even greater sense of being disbelieved.

Today, the FDA only requires that surgeons advise patients about ‘potential harms’ of breast implants. The fact that many are still placed annually in the U.S. (almost 200,000 in 2020) weighs heavily on Marjorie, adding to her feelings of dismay and her own regrets for ever getting them.

Throughout the early years of her illness, Marjorie remained a remarkably well organized record keeper. In an effort to give meaning and belief to her long journey, she retained documentation on medical visits, lab work, newsletters, articles, and her personal correspondence with others about amalgams and implants. Her research included contacting anyone who might have information helpful to herself or someone else. One large album, and perhaps now the most meaningful, is filled with thank you responses from the patients, families, and clinics with whom she shared information, those who came to believe that the dangers are real.

Can you imagine spending years in ill health while struggling over and over to warn others? Can you imagine how you would feel when most of those around you return silence or direct statements of disbelief? Could it be that Marjorie’s poor health is as much the result of failed medical and regulatory systems as it is the mercury and implant materials that have proven impossible to remove completely from her body and brain? Her childhood struggle for acceptance, coupled with long years of unresolved illness and the disbelief of others, became the perfect storm for the emotionally isolated and secluded life she lives today.

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The use of mercury in dentistry (as well as in medicine) goes far back into antiquity; in America, controversy around the use of mercury amalgams goes back more than a century and a half. It is but one aspect of the very complex story of American health, a journey we have often taken unwittingly . . . and with disbelief that we could be harmed by our own actions.

This is what makes Marjorie’s story relevant to the many Americans who are living with illnesses and disabilities that allopathic medicine can neither explain nor truly heal. Thankfully, professional associations such as the International Academy of Oral and Medical Toxicology (IAOMT) are (re)training ‘biological dentists’ in the use of biocompatible materials and protective protocols for amalgam removal.

Unfortunately, however, the problems of damage from toxins and disbelief by physicians and others is not limited to amalgams and implants; sources of toxicity exist in air, water, soil, and common household products. As we have written about in an earlier post, most doctors are ill-prepared for recognizing toxins as a major contributor to illness.

Marjorie’s story is special but it is not unique. Others are taking similar journeys as they try to heal in a country continually advancing into toxicity and within a largely allopathic healthcare system focused on pharmaceutical solutions rather than changing the root causes of disease.

America has been slow to ask the simple question, “why?”: why is chronic disease rising, why are children getting sicker, why are allergies becoming normal, why are we spending so much on healthcare, and why are our health outcomes poorer than other modern countries who spend less?

And why have people like Margorie had to spend decades in poor health despite so much personal effort to be well?

Thankfully, new methods for cleansing the body of toxins are being pioneered and continually updated by functionally-minded practitioners who focus on removing the root causes of disease. We will cover how some of these can be found in online directories in a future article on “The Many Faces of Medicine”.

Living Well Locally envisions a time when integrative and lifestyle-based healthcare become the norm, when doctors look for causes rather than to standardized drug protocols, and when health insurers make it possible for everyone to have access to care that can heal. A deep thanks to Marjorie for allowing us to use her story.