Abraham (ah-BRAHM), my dentist. I am so happy to have found him. He’s the husband of a friend, he works out of their gorgeous home overlooking all of the central valley, about five minutes from us. He takes his time, talks about what interests him, has been a dentist most of his life. A gentler man you will never meet. And a fine dentist, to boot.

Last week, I went to Abraham to see about removing my mercury amalgam fillings. Before he would even talk about that, he insisted on cleaning my teeth. My recent cleaning was not done properly. He explained in detail all the many unpleasant consequences of plaque build-up. I must say, it was the best cleaning I’ve had since I’ve been here. For small money. I don’t really want to say how much because he might have given me a good deal since I’m Mrs. Abraham’s bud. But it was considerably less than $50.

Yesterday, he replaced two of the five mercury fillings. I won’t bore you further with my new religion, heavy metal poisoning (which, by the way, is killing us all. Just so you know.) Suffice it to say, I did some research into safe removal…

"Oh. My. God!" as Janice would say. Truly "safe removal" is not an easy thing to accomplish by a long shot.

You need barriers and screens and face coverings and rubber dams. The dentist and the assistant need to wear gas masks. I am not kidding here. Would I joke about a thing as serious as mercury removal from your mouth? Ok, yes. But not now, not when it’s my mouth.

It’s involved. You need to take a special elixir with you to rinse out your mouth made with bleach (not household, some other kind but I can’t find the recipe now.) Whatever you do, don’t trust the dentist’s plain old water to rinse and spit – that will never get the heavy metals out of your mouth.

Hulda Clark, the diva of CureZone.com, who I greatly admire and who does not mince words, says removing mercury amalgam is not enough. You have to remove the amalgamed teeth. Yeah: the teeth out of your head. As well as the root canals. Then you keep them in a jar for future reference. I’m pretending someone I think so highly of did not suggest I do that. She says, "The Amalgam Era may soon be known as the darkest era in human history." C’mon, Hulda, don’t tiptoe around it. Just say what you think.

The safe removal list dos and donts is intense enough, not including the warnings about the type of replacement amalgams used. Don’t get started down this path. It’s endless, mostly incomprehensible and sounds expensive.

And it didn’t happen like that yesterday at Abraham’s. He wore his usual cute blue SARS mask, I held a paper towel and wore the blue apron around my neck. He wore rubber gloves, he drilled it out instead of "chunking" it out (drilling just enough to break up, then picking out the pieces.) I rinsed with plain water, no dams, no elixir, nada más. He filled the cleaned out caverns with Grandio, a nano-hybrid restorative material. It says so right on the box. I spit gray water for a few minutes, that was creepy. Otherwise, I’m good.

Apparently, even if you swallow some of the mercury, it passes through you. Maybe I’m extra contaminated for the moment from breathing fumes and swallowing poison. But no matter how it gets out of you, a year from now, my mercury levels will be dramatically reduced if my recovery goes like everyone else’s. I’ll probably be thinner and smarter, too. Which is secretly the only reason I’m doing this.

Oh: plus the fact I can get this done for $40/filling. According to the group over at Dental-Chelation, this runs 1,000s of dollars in developed nations. Even penniless I can afford health care in Costa Rica. So two down, three to go, a quadrant at a time. This Friday he replaces another one, a few days after that, the last two. I feel better already.