Some unconventional thinkers have painfully shown us that freedom may also include the freedom of the fool.
Freedom is also often abused.
It is like the ingenuity with which the freedom to do anything and not do anything has recently been fraternized with.
However, whether it is in the spirit of invention that environmental sins and damage to health should be accepted for as long as possible with reference to possible, but hypothetical innovations, must be doubted.
The ingenuity is more of an impatient humanist.
In this respect, amalgam is the brown coal of dentistry. The filling material containing heavy metals is still used. Germany is even far ahead in Europe. Norway and Sweden have been doing without completely for years; in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain and other countries, more than 98 percent alternative filling materials - plastic composites and glass ionomer cements - are used. The reason is well known: half of amalgam contains mercury, a nerve and liver toxin that is not excreted and can therefore accumulate in the body. Most of the bioavailable mercury is still consumed by German citizens with fish - and with amalgam. Since lights, thermometers and batteries containing mercury have been banned, the amalgam in the mouth is the only large, targeted anthropogenic source of mercury.
Meanwhile, everything speaks in favor of phasing out amalgam, including the tightening of rules worldwide. The international Minamata Convention, the EU mercury regulation, the “Zero Pollution Action Plan” recently presented by Brussels and also the medical device regulation revised after the breast implants scandal, which comes into force this Wednesday, all say according to strict interpretation the same thing: amalgam was yesterday and no longer belongs in the mouth. The advances in alternative filling materials are now being celebrated in specialist journals such as the dental magazine. Four out of five Europeans are in favor of an amalgam ban in surveys. A coalition of fifty German organizations, including dental assistants and environmentally conscious dentists, patient organizations and nature conservation associations,are now calling for amalgam to be phased out by 2025.
By the end of the decade at the latest, it would be over anyway. The tightening that is pending internationally in the Minamata and EU negotiations suggests that. Ironically, however, the representatives of the majority of dentists in the state, the Federal Dental Association and the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Dentists, see it as grinding their teeth. "Due to its ease of use, durability and cost-effectiveness, dental amalgam continues to be a suitable filling material for a number of restorations," they write in their statement on the occasion of the revision of the EU mercury regulation. The development of a substitute material equivalent to the amalgam is not yet complete, as is the "research into the short and long-term effects of the currently available restoration materials". In summary, the result of their weighing of interests is:You are welcome to pull the dirty cart out of the mud at some point - just let's go ahead and wait until the ingenious solution is found. Old dentist wisdom: Sometimes the tooth just has to go out to prevent worse.