Until a legal victory is won in the UK courts, we will never be able to get official recognition that our injuries were caused by dental mercury. Nor will we get the general acceptance by the medical profession and the media of our claims. Supporting a sound legal challenge is what we need to focus on right now.
If you contact just about any solicitor company and tell them that you are seeking compensation (or mere treatment) for injury caused by dental amalgam mercury, you will find that you are never even allowed to speak to an actual solicitor. Instead you will be fobbed off again and again with one or other bogus excuse, such as “there’s no clear evidence”, or “time-limitations exclude you”, or “you can’t sue dentists for just following standard protocols which are officially safe anyway”.
In among these false excuses, one solicitor company claimed that my legal prospects would be helped if I were to first persuade the government to change its policy on the safety of amalgam. But the reality of the history of medical law is the exact opposite. It has only been by the winning of legal claims that government policies have been dragged into line with scientific reality. For instance in respect of asbestos and tobacco.
Solicitors are negative about amalgam cases because of the false assumptions they have. Firstly they suppose that the scientific evidence of harm is far from clear. And that the case would require very expensive expert witnesses. And this would end up costing hundreds of thousands in costs, not least because every dentist in the land would supposedly join the defence against the claimant. And so no-one has ever won such a case, and there are no group actions already.
But lawyers are not scientists. At best they check out the very cleverly misleading propaganda from wikipedia and the various pro-amalgam sources, and that very clever propaganda tricks them into thinking that there is at least the appearance of a reasonable defence of amalgam usage.
They then “reason” that the reason why there are no group actions and no-one has ever won an amalgam case is because the case is weak. But on the contrary, the real reason is that every time anyone tries to approach any number of solicitors regarding amalgam they can’t even get a foot in the door let alone a proper examination of the scientific evidence. So of course there are no group actions let alone winners. A sort of Catch 22 it seems.
Let’s continue now to unpick the rest of the lawyers’ mythology about amalgam.
Firstly, it is not the case that all the nation’s dentists would join the defence against us; indeed none would. That’s because a sensible legal action will not blame the dentists, any more than we should sue the corner shop if they sold us a can of Heinz beans which turned out to contain something bad. Rather the blame lies with the government, and their policymakers such as the Chief Dental Officer who have had a duty of clinical care to produce sound policies for the dentists to follow.
Secondly, the case against amalgam’s safety is not in reality unclear. On the contrary, in order to fool us that there is a lack of evidence of harm, the defenders of amalgam have gone to great lengths to grossly misrepresent the situation, by systematically omitting to mention all that huge evidence that contradicts their own assertions. In reality, not only is the scientific defence of amalgam a stupendous load of pseudo-science, but it is even further undermined by the very clear demonstration of systematic pretending away of the evidence of harm. This systematic failing to mention lays bare that the defenders of amalgam, even the most “leading experts” for the defence, have absolutely no competence as witnesses to the safety of amalgam. It follows that their scientific case will be impossible to defend against competently briefed claimants in any competent court of law.
Thirdly, there is not necessarily a need for costly expert witnesses. That’s partly because as I’ve just explained, even the most senior “experts” for the defendants are already discredited as pseudic charlatans. The Department of Health rested their defence case, in their official reply to my own pre-action Letter of Claim, on five published “expert” reports (SCENIHR 2008, COT 1997, FDA 2002, WHO 1998, EC 1998), which are all patently charlatanic exercises of failing to mention the counter-evidence. So with those reports they’ve already called their best experts on the science, and they have proved to be mere pseudery. And we can easily call, as our own expert “witnesses”, already-published reports which utterly demolish those defence reports.
That leaves the question of whether costly expert witnesses could still be needed in respect of the specific proof of causation of a particular claimant’s injuries by the amalgam. On this point, we have already shown that the defendants have no credible experts on amalgam illness (or its non-existence as they would claim), so it follows that the court itself will have to make the judgement of how strongly the symptoms history of the patient has pointed to amalgam as the cause.
What you need to do now!
My own legal claim for dental amalgam clinical negligence is absolutely impossible for the government to honestly defend against. The only way they could get off the hook would be if the case were quietly hushed up and falsely killed off in a lower court out of the public eye. If just myself were to turn up at the court, that might happen. But if you and a reasonable number of other supporters were to attend the court, or even just be on record as interested in the case, then this would encourage them to treat the matter with more respect. You could also possibly join in as a co-claimant in a group action, though that is less crucial than just being a noticeable supporter of the case.
My own legal action is envisaged to be filed within the next few months, and then there will be court hearings and other decisions in the months following that. You need to be in contact with our group (email list or facebook group or just phone or address contact) so we can let you know of further developments and further information. There’s no commitment and no cost.
So be sure to get in contact right now before you forget!
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Robin Clarke, DMVUK coordinator
rpclarke(at)autismcauses.info
0121 456 4274
Concurrence of increased autism enrolments in California with increased adult disability claims in UK.