Bex - yeah, I hear ya about the mistakes - I'm second guessing myself at every step of investigating my amalgam removal to try to avoid them!

The problem is, a lot of times you don't know what you're doing is a mistake until after you've done it!! It's hard to make informed decisions when the information we need to get better is being withheld/hidden/subverted by the "powers that be" - meaning the Dental Associations and other people invested in keeping amalgam usage legal. That's why this forum is so great - the word's actually getting into the hands of the people that need it the most!!

It's a real bummer that what's causing your food reactions is so difficult to get rid of - especially when you're not 100% sure what it is!! Gangrene sounds pretty serious - what are your options for treating that without messing with your lingering infection and everything else you're dealing with?

You're probably gotten boatloads of advice, but have you ever tried olive leaf extract? It's virucidal, anti-bacterial, destroys candida organisms and, best of all, INEXPENSIVE. I use it to prevent colds and get rid of cold sores. It saved my husband's butt the night before his aunt's funeral. He ate some bad lunch meat at her wake the night before, and woke up at 1 am heaving his guts up. He was in a panic because he was supposed to be a pallbearer at the funeral in 7 hours!! I made him take a few squirts of olive leaf extract, and re-take it after it came up again, and thank God, he was able to get to the funeral on time and do his thing without being sick. That stuff is a life-saver!!

You're so right about diet helping things - it's amazing how your body can respond to food that's "right" for it. They say that a sign of nutritional deficiency is the disappearance of those little half-moon white marks at the base of your fingernails. Before I started my diet from hell (anti-dairy, anti-grain), I could only see the marks on my thumbnail - the rest of them were gone. Now after being forced to eat veggies, proteins & healthy fats for over a year (a lot like what you've been doing), the half-moons on 4 of my fingernails are coming back. I guess even when we're sick, when we're doing the right things, other things DO get better... It'd be nice if it were a bit quicker, though!!

I'm so glad this forum is here for all of us that are trying to figure out our problems and how to get onto the path to getting our lives back without being crushed under the heels of the evil dental mafia!!