Lyme Disease and Mercury Fillings

I love working outside. Whether it be mowing the lawn or cleaning up brush in the woods, doing outside manual labor is “therapy” for me. However, I have also grown petrified of contracting Lyme disease.
I have seen a steady increase in the number of my patients who say they have contracted Lyme disease. Most of these people said they had the classic “bulls-eye” rash, went on antibiotics for a couple of weeks and were done with it. I have also had other patients who are dealing with long-term issues associated with Lyme disease. Most of the data I found agreed that the success of treating Lyme disease is higher the sooner it is identified and treated. The same data also noted that misdiagnosis of Lyme disease is very high, which often delays treatment.
I think it is pretty safe to say that Lyme disease is bad news. Lyme disease is a multi-system inflammatory disease that affects many of the systems in the body, including the brain. It is most commonly thought to be acquired through the bite of a deer tick that is carrying the dangerous bacteria. However, newer medical evidence shows that the bacteria may also be spread through other means.
Other than the standard antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease, there are also many “alternative” treatments out there. It seems to me that when there are multiple “alternative” treatments to things, where some people show improvement and others do not, the disease itself is not very well understood. I believe this is the case with Lyme disease.
I had a patient recently ask me to review some information about a treatment she is ready to start to battle the symptoms she has from Lyme disease. The process is basically to detoxify the body of heavy metals, including mercury. If you look at stuff on the web about this it brings up the well-known silver/mercury filling debate. Here is an excerpt from one of the websites I found:
“Mercury amalgams are about 55% mercury, and the government makes dentists handle them like nuclear reactor material before it goes into the mouth, and when it comes out of the mouth they have to handle it in the same way, in a bio-hazardous container. But the American Dental Association still tells the dentists and the patients that it’s safe when it’s inside your head. And I think that’s oxymoronic. It doesn’t even make sense.
That means that our heads are considered bio-hazard containers. There’s a device called a mercury vapor analyzer, a device that can be stuck in your mouth after you chew a piece of gum, and it can show you how much mercury is coming off your gum every time you chew. But a lot of people who use that vapor device find that the mercury content in their mouth exceeds the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommendation for safe air.”
There is no published scientific data that I am aware of that shows that removal of silver fillings from your mouth cures anything. Having said that, I have not used the material for over 12 years for basically the same reasons that are described in the quote above.
As far as the Lyme disease issue goes, my recommendation is not to get Lyme disease. It seems that Lyme disease is not well understood. For my patient, and anyone who continues to have symptoms after conventional antibiotic treatment, I guess I would try any alternative treatment that seemed reasonable with little risk.