Hydro Eclectic Power

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

She Was Shocked--Shocked--at the Charges Her Dentist Wrought

The 66-year-old Florida woman was no stranger to pain, having long suffered a chronic nerve disorder called trigeminal neuralgia that causes sharp twinges on the right side of her face.

But this was even worse: excruciating jolts of pain that she described as "electrical," along the roof of her mouth. Oddly, she told doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., the attacks came whenever she ate tomatoes or other acidic foods.

Turns out it was electrical. A recent root canal procedure had created in effect a crude battery in her mouth. The dental work had repositioned a mercury-amalgam filling closer to an adjacent tooth with a gold-alloy crown. Acidic saliva caused a tiny current to pass between the two metals--enough to trigger severe pain along her exquisitely sensitive facial nerve.

Adjacent dental fillings made of dissimilar metals, in contact with saliva, can form a galvanic "battery" generating electrical currents with potentials of less than a volt, said neurologist William Cheshire Jr., who reported the case in a recent letter to the New England Journal of Medicine. Such currents usually cause no symptoms, Cheshire said, though some patients report "a metallic or battery-like taste."

The upshot for his 66-year-old patient: Once her mercury amalgam was replaced with a porcelain restoration, the pain-galvanizing "battery" went dead, and she could safely return to eating tomatoes.

--Don Colburn

Dreaming of a Cure

By helping reduce stress, dream groups may benefit the body's ability to heal itself

It's fairly well known that "dreamwork"--exploration of one's dreams in a guided group setting--can be a potent form of therapy, helping reduce fears, enhance self-understanding and spur insights into making life plans. But Tallulah Lyons, an artist and educator speaking at the recent meeting of the Association for the Study of Dreams, argues that working with dreams can help fight disease as well.

Since the body's immune response--its inherent ability to battle disease--is weakened by stress, and since successful dreamwork can reduce stress, she reasons, working with one's dreams can help people's bodies battle illness. "The immune system and dreams serve analogous functions," Lyons says. "Both keep the body/psyche balanced and healthy."

It's a theory she explores in the world of cancer treatment. Lyons, who works at The Wellness Community in Atlanta, for the past year has met weekly with seven women in various stages of recovery from cancer. They meet in the art room over lunch, sitting around a large table with a candle in the center. Each woman reads a dream, gives it a title, identifies the primary feeling that it evokes and discusses it with others.