I am kind of a newbie to this forum, and was wondering if some more seasoned members would be willing to share their experiences with getting their replacement dental restoration materials? I need to get new crowns and fillings soon, and am looking for some materials with the best bio-compatibility possible. I have sifted through the first 10 pages or so of posts on the forum trying to get a feel for what has worked best so far for those that have already gone through this process. It seems that a few people on the forum have drilled out their mercury-laden amalgams, only to have unfortunately replaced them with seemingly bio-incompatible dental materials that caused them a whole set of different problems later on.

To this point, it seems as though the top restorative materials contenders on the forum that I have found so far appear to be the Diamond series (Diamond Crown, Diamond Lite, etc.), although I have also noticed a couple of posters that said they might have had problems with these materials. I have also noticed that the CEREC materials seem to hold some promise as a possibility, although while browsing the forum yesterday I found one poster from a year ago who said that her test showed that she was not compatible with certain CEREC materials (Janey--11/08/05 under post named ‘Some info on cerec…’). However, I am still actually leaning toward trying these out if a compatibility test shows that they should work for me. There is just something about hard ceramic materials where it seems logical to me that they would not leech their materials much. After all, these kinds of materials are the ones used in pools and fountains, and have stood up in some cases to decades of being covered by water and harsh chemicals like chlorine. I’m not dogmatic about this though, and would easily change my opinion if I can get enough evidence one way or another to support another solution. In any case, I figure that if the CEREC’s work for me that this might offer an alternative possibility for a few that do not test well for some of the other successful products such as the Diamond series—on the other hand, if they don’t work for me then I figure that I can at least help to warn people on the forum of any bad experience with them.

Some questions that I was hoping that people could answer might include some of the following items below. I know that this is a lot of questions--I'm not necessarily looking for answers to each question in every post, but am just trying to glean whatever information that I can. Thanks in advance for any information that you share—all of you have been such an awesome resource already!

1. What dental materials have been placed in your mouth?
2. How long have these materials been in your mouth?
3. Which dentist placed these materials, and were you satisfied with his/her work done? Did they follow a particular protocol, such as the Huggins protocol?
4. How much did this dentist charge for their procedures?
5. What kinds of precautions did the dentist use to minimize mercury vapor exposure during amalgam removal?
6. What kinds of precautions did you as the patient use to minimize your mercury exposure during amalgam removal?
7. If the dentist was good, where is this dentist located, so that others on the forum might use their services in the future?
8. Did you use testing of any sort to determine beforehand if these dental materials would be safe for you?
9. Did the test(s) miss anything regarding an allergic reaction that you might have had later?
10. Did you follow a specific order in the removal of your amalgams or crowns?
11. Have you chelated since having your dental materials replaced?
12. What kinds of chelation have you used? What dosages did you take, and how often?
13. Has the chelation been successful so far? What kinds of symptoms have decreased/increased since starting chelation?
14. Did you make any 'mistakes' during your chelation process that you wish you would have done differently in hindsight?
15. What kinds of supplements have you used during chelation? Have they helped reduce your symptoms?
16. Do you have any other possible health issues that do not seem to be related to your dental materials (previous or present)?
17. If you could do the whole process all over again from the beginning, would there be anything that you would do differently the next time around?

Thanks so much! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
Jason