Our office sends our patients if needed to have a blood sample done which is sent to either Peak Energy Performance or Clifford Testing Center to be tested to see what dental material are compatible with your individual immune system. There are many dental material and some are highly reactive to the individual patient.. We receive a list or CD from the companies testing telling us which dental materials are best suited for you personally.

The restorative materials we use today have all been developed with “most people” in mind. Most people can put up with a bit of toxicity, immune reactivity and galvanic stress. However, there are outliers, and perhaps their numbers are growing, who can’t stand up to those stresses as well as others. The prevalence of multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS) has been reported to be somewhere between 12 and 33% in the general population, with 2 to 6% having been actually diagnosed as such.

There is a well documented physiological basis for MCS. Genetic variations leave some people with low-functioning enzymes in critical detoxification pathways, such as methylation, phase-2 conjugation, reduction of oxidized glutathione, membrane transport, and others. The result is that they can’t excrete the chemicals they are exposed to effectively, and essentially are poisoned. Some researchers have suggested that there are psychological components to the disease as well. Certainly the experience of MCS leads to fear of exposure in the hearts of these patients, including fear of dental materials.

Moreover, there is a significant number of people who are overtly allergic, or otherwise immunologically reactive, to chemicals in their environment. This phenomenon ranges from true allergies to something akin to non-allergic food sensitivities. It results in a range of idiosyncratic, highly individual immune reactions in susceptible people.

These people tend to know who they are, and they are immensely grateful when their dentist acknowledges the problem when prescribing dental materials. After all, people can manage food sensitivities by rotating the diet, but they can’t rotate their permanently installed artificial dental fillings. By practicing individualized biocompatibility testing, and making other common sense choices, we can (almost) always find a combination of professionally recognized restorative materials that will do the job. We can fix teeth and at the same time help our patients avoid toxicity, immune reactivity, and galvanic stress, and just as important, provide them with peace of mind.

At the same time, “most people” benefit from the same level of care, even if they are not, or not aware of being, chemically sensitive.