Living Well With Dr. Michelle Master Class #1 – What Is Holistic Dentistry?
Click below to watch our in-office course: “What Is Holistic Dentistry” or read the course transcript below.
Learn how Holistic dentistry may be the missing piece in your health and wellness journey.
Presented by Dr. Michelle Jorgensen, DDS, FAGD, TNC, CNAS
Introduction:
Thank you all for being here. I’m going to share my story. I have an interesting background!
My father is a dentist and he’s been practicing for probably 40 years or more and he’s an amazing dentist, he still is practicing actually. He was very interested in continuing education, about learning more about dentistry.
Dentistry was his hobby as well as his profession and I learned from watching him. He is an icon for me in my journey and how I pursue education, but it was traditional education. I was learning a lot, we were practicing, had a busy practice and things were going well and then I started to get sick and I didn’t know why.
I went to every doctor I could think of. I had MRIs, I had all sorts of testing, blood testing, up and down and nobody really had many answers for me. I got somewhat better because I was changing my lifestyle, changing my diet. I was doing a lot of different things and I got a little bit better but I didn’t get a lot better.
And the worrisome part is that my hand was so numb I couldn’t hold the drill anymore, the dental drill. Well you know nobody wants to go to a dentist who can’t really hold the drill, since it’s kind of not really the best for building confidence in your care.
I was getting sick and one of the things that I noticed was my memory. I’ve always thought I had a pretty good memory. I could remember a lot of things about patients and all of a sudden I would go from room to the next room and I couldn’t remember the patient I had just been working on.
And that’s just not like me. I usually can look at an x-ray and know exactly who it is just from the x-ray. And so I knew something was wrong. I put my practice up for sale and I started looking for what I was going to do next.
I was in my mid-30s, I did not know what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I started talking to colleagues around the country about different opportunities to coach or teach or different things and I was led to a doctor in Philadelphia.
He said “You sound so much like me, have you ever looked into mercury poisoning?” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any mercury fillings in my mouth. And he said, “Oh, it’s not the mercury fillings you have, it’s the mercury fillings you drill out every single day without protection.”
I’d never given a second thought to it because I was not taught that in school. In school they told us that everything we were using was completely safe, not to worry a bit about that mercury. So I got tested, sure enough mercury poisoning off the charts and if I was going to continue practicing dentistry I had to figure out a way to do it differently. I had to figure out how to drill out those fillings without me getting any more mercury.
So my transition started because of me, because I needed to practice dentistry. I still needed a career. I started trying to learn new ways of doing it and removing those fillings without me breathing it in.
And I had to learn a lot of different techniques, I had to learn a lot of different procedures and I had no idea the journey I was going to get on when I started there. And it’s been quite a journey and a lot of that is what I’m going to share with you today.
The next couple of pictures are interesting. My picture here with my holding the diploma in front of me is at the end of a long course continuum. I had attended a course that was a nine course continuum and each of these courses was three days and costs $5,000. So I want you to do the math. Okay 9 times $5,000; I spent $45,000 just in the course fees alone, let alone travel, time away from my practice to learn these things.
I was at the very end of the continuum, I was sitting at the lunch table, all of the dentists at the lunch table would have spent $45,000 plus, have spent all this time away from practice to come and learn about dentistry.
They’re going to be the cream of the crop right? The top of the field guys sitting at this table. We’re just casually chatting and one of the dentists starts laughing about a dentist in his building who wore a hazmat suit while he was taking out mercury fillings and everybody at the table started to laugh.
And I sat there and I thought, “Do I say something, do I not say something? Do I say something?” And I always say something but I’ve learned how to say it. I looked at them and I just said, “You know what? Can I share my story with you?” because I’ve learned that if you share your story nobody can argue about my story.
My story is my story, they can’t tell me my story is wrong because my story is mine. So I just said, “Can I share my story with you?” And I shared my story and everybody at the table quickly became very apologetic.
I said, “No, I’m not looking for apologies, I just want you to know why some of us may choose to practice differently than you do.” And the reason I tell that story is because I want you to realize dentists that practice this way or that don’t practice this way, we don’t do it because we’re intentionally trying to do something wrong or right, it’s because we just don’t know.
Those were people who had been through all of this training and they didn’t know, they didn’t know. And that’s the large majority of the dentist population, they don’t know. They don’t know that they could be getting sick, they don’t know that their team could be getting sick, they don’t know their patients could be getting sick, they don’t know.
That’s again why I just launched Total Care Academy tonight. We have 12 beta doctors that we’re starting to teach and in January we’re launching it to dentists at large anywhere and we’re teaching other dentists how to do this. I feel so strongly that people need to know, and that’s why we’re telling you so that you go and you demand this of dentists as well.
So that’s my background, that’s where I’m at today, from tradition to health basically is what I say, it’s interesting in dentistry.
What’s wrong with the traditional sugar causes cavities theory
Who in here knows that you should brush your teeth? I hope you all raise your hand. You all know you brush your teeth. Who in here has ever seen a commercial for toothpaste before? Everybody should hopefully raise their hands unless you don’t watch TV at all which maybe that’s a good thing.
Education is the highest it’s ever been in dentistry and health care in general, right? And that’s all you hear about today. I’ve heard that wellness is the new beauty. It’s the cool thing to talk about wellness. Education is at a high, spending is at a high, $2 billion are spent on dental products every year alone, just toothpaste and toothbrushes.
Isn’t that amazing? $2 billion, so of course we know how to take care of our teeth. So what do you think cavities have done if education is at a high, if spending is at a high what have cavities done? They should go down if everything’s going right, they’ve gone up.
There are more cavities today than there have ever been, why? Because we’re taking care of the symptoms not the source. Think about your typical dental visit, you walk into the dentist office, you sit down on the chair, the hygienist or assistants sees you, they take a couple of x-rays, they do a dental exam, they set you up and they say, “Okay, you have a cavity, you need a crown.”
You’ve all been here before you all know this story. And then you go to the front desk, you schedule for that cavity or that crown, you come back, you get it fixed and then six months later you do it all over again.
Did anyone ever talk to you about why you got that cavity? Or do you really need a crown? Or what does that crown do to your tooth down the road after you’ve had that crown? We don’t talk about the sources of problems in dentistry; typically we just talked about the symptom.
And the cavity is the symptom, the cavity is the symptom that something’s gone wrong, that’s what we try to do here is really get rid of this outdated, ineffective model and do it a different way.
Many of the symptoms that people write off as “Getting older, just getting a little tired, oh that’s just what happens when I’m 50” those sorts of things that you say, a lot of these things actually can be prevented and they are distress signals that your body is sending out. It is saying something’s wrong, something’s not right here, and can you help me out.”
But instead we just write it off as, “Oh we’re just getting older.” No it’s not and a lot of this is related to the mouth. And I know that because I’m a dentist, you expect me to say that but it’s true. So we’re going to show you how and why.
All right I’m going to go through some simple things to begin with. First of all what does your mom tell you, you should do to avoid cavities? If you don’t want a cavity what should you do? Brush your teeth because what causes cavities?
Sugar, right? 100% sugar causes cavities. Well mom was mostly right, sugar plus a tooth does create a cavity but what’s missing? Bacteria, those bugs in that mouth that eat the sugar that then create the cavity in the tooth.
So there are some things that are missing even just in the simple explanation. There in fact are actually three main ways of that tooth decay is formed, those cavities are formed.
One is brushing your teeth, the second is hormones and the third is nutrition and we’re going to go through this, we’re going to take it one step at a time. So there are- – if you look at this picture you’ll see this is what a tooth is made up of.
There’s enamel on the outside layer, there’s what’s called dentin on the inside layer, it’s a lot softer and then there’s the nerve in the center of the tooth. You’re going to need to know that as we talk through the rest of the things.
You’re going to need to know what a tooth is made up of. In the 1940s, there was a meeting and they brought a whole bunch of dental researchers all together and they decided they were going to vote on what caused cavities, don’t you love that? They’re going to vote.
They had three people that presented their theories at the time, this was one of the theories that was presented is that bacteria in your mouth eat the sugar and they create a cavity. Which one do you think won?
This one because isn’t this the only one you’ve ever heard? You eat sugar, you get a cavity. It’s the only one you’ve ever heard. When they voted, this is the one they voted. We’re going to talk about the two that they didn’t vote for and why they’re actually extremely important for you to know.
The acidogenic theory is that if you eat sugar, it causes a cavity, that’s what happens. So let’s talk about way Number One, how do you prevent it? You all know the answer, brush your teeth but let’s talk about a few little specifics on this one.
How to clean your mouth and your teeth.
When you’re brushing your teeth, you need to angle your toothbrush a little differently, you don’t go straight at the tooth, you actually want to angle it slightly upward toward the gum. You’re going to gently swish back and forth and then swoop everything away from the tooth, away from the gum, down towards the rest of the mouth, that’s called the bass method.
And what it does, is help bring everything from under the gum out. It’s simple, it’s just the way to clean it.
You know what, I don’t care if you floss. How many dentists have told you that before?
I know I don’t care if you floss, I just want you to clean between somehow. So you can use a Waterpik, you can use a toothpick, you can use a shower floss, you can use anything, I don’t care, you just need to clean between your teeth, you also need to clean your tongue.
How many of you have seen or used a tongue scraper before? Good, hopefully some people have .If you think about your tongue it looks a lot like a shag carpet, so everything in your mouth harbors inside of that tongue.
If you’re not cleaning the tongue, you’re not cleaning your mouth and that’s going to be a source of bacteria that continually reinfect the mouth if you’re not cleaning your tongue. So I bust through that because that’s the stuff that you kind of already know, right?
Cleaning your teeth, brushing your teeth, cleaning between and hopefully cleaning your tongue is a little new. I didn’t talk about how ever toothpaste. Have you ever looked at the back of a toothpaste tube, a traditional toothpaste tube?
Have you ever looked at the back of it, the ingredients in it and the warnings? The warnings it’ll say, “You’ll die, if you ingest this.” that kind of warning. So interesting and the gum tissue is actually one cell thick.
One cell is between you and the rest of your body, between your mouth and the rest of your body. People tell me all the time, “Well I don’t swallow my toothpaste.” It doesn’t matter if you swallow it because it’s going to get through that cell into the rest of your body.
Whatever you’re putting in your mouth in the form of toothpaste will get into you guaranteed. If you look at the ingredients I want you to say, “Would I eat this? Because if you wouldn’t eat it, don’t brush your teeth with it.
I love a product called Earth Paste or any other tooth powder, a toothpaste that is very simple, it needs to have some clay, some essential oils, maybe a little bit of a natural sweetener like stevia that’s it, that is all your toothpaste should have in it is that.
And the purpose of that toothpaste is to get stuff off a little bit but it’s not to foam up, it’s not to make your mouth feel minty fresh, it’s not any of those things that all those commercial toothpastes do, it’s to help your mouth stay clean and balanced, really balanced.
Hormones and cavities
Okay let’s get into a little bit more of the interesting pieces. One of the other findings or things that were presented at that meeting was that hormones affect your teeth. Now I want you to think about this, how many times have you heard of a teenager who has had ten cavities or you may have had your own teenager or been that teenager who has ten cavities or a mom who got pregnant and said, “Oh this crown is from this baby, this cavity is from this baby” right?
What’s changing in a teenager’s body and a pregnant woman’s body? Hormones, big-time changing. So was it just because the teenager stopped brushing their teeth when they were 13? Possibly, I have two 13 year-olds at my house, so it’s very possible that they just stopped brushing their teeth but it’s more probable that the hormones actually were out of whack.
A couple of things happen when those hormones change. There’s actually a fluid flow in the tooth and that fluid flow flows from the inside out. It’s the way that the tooth is nourished. You remember that nerve that I showed that’s in the very center of the tooth? It has blood vessels, it has other things coming up through the center of the tooth and the nutrients from your body come through- – I think they’ll come and help them out.
Those nutrients come up through that Center nerve and go out through little tiny channels like pores in the tooth out to the outside enamel. The tooth itself is fed from the inside out, the fluid comes up through the nerve of the tooth, out through those pores into the enamel on the outside of the tooth. When hormones change, that fluid flow reverses and it actually comes from the outside in.
Naturally in a tooth, it’s a natural cleaning mechanism, there’s a fluid flow that goes out, pushes things off the outside of the tooth when the hormones change and it reverses, it pulls things in. So teenagers and pregnant women are particularly at risk, so are menopausal women and there’s such thing as menopausal men – -I think it’s called something different but hormone changes happen at different times in our lives, those times are particularly dangerous .
The other difference is, think about what’s happening in a teenager’s body or a pregnant woman’s body there’s a huge demand for building blocks. We call building blocks nutrients basically a huge demand for minerals, vitamins, things that are going to grow bones.
During that time a teenager is growing from here to here in three years’ time all of the building blocks are being used to grow those bones rather than support the tooth. They have a double whammy, you have fluid flow that’s reversed, pulling things in and you have a huge demand on the system right then for those building blocks.
So teenagers and pregnant women what do you do? We’re going to talk about this but that is a problem. The other problem is that a lot of us live right now in a very fight-or-flight mode and it’s not really our fault.
Our world is in a fight-or-flight mode, just the lights that are around us all the time, the Wi-Fi frequencies that are around us all the time, the cellular frequencies that are around us all the time, all these things put our bodies into a consistent fight-or-flight mode which throws off our hormones.
So just because you’re not a teenager or a pregnant woman doesn’t mean that your hormones can’t be affected by the world around you because of what’s going on in the world around you. All of these things are important for everybody to know.
Nutrition and preventing cavities
Okay, the third theory that was presented at that meaning was by Dr. Weston Price. Now who of you have you have heard of Dr. Weston Price before? If you’ve heard of any traditional medicine you’ve heard of Dr. Weston Price. You may not have known he was a dentist.
Here is a really interesting story. In the 1930’s he was a very prominent member of the American Dental Association Research Committee.
He wasn’t just a fringe dentist, he was right in the middle of the most prestigious organization in dentistry and what he was disturbed about was that he saw an increase in cavities even though everybody was being educated, he saw cavities going up particularly in children and he said, “You know what? I’m tired of this, I want to figure out what’s going on.”
He and his wife embarked on a multi-year adventure, where they went all around the world finding indigenous societies that they could study. And they looked at these societies- -so people who had not been touched by the modern world, the modern diet they said, “Okay, this is what they’re eating, this is what their teeth look like.”
And the cool part about him is that Number One, there still were people who he could study, today, we couldn’t find them right? There’s no indigenous society that hasn’t had sugar, white sugar in their diet at least at some point. They could still find these societies and Number Two they had a camera so they could start taking pictures of them, of the teeth and the people.
They took pictures of all of them and the jaws and the growth and development and everything so they could correlate what they were eating with the way they were growing and developing and what their teeth health will look like.
This is an interesting picture, you can see the boy on the left, they’re brothers, the boy on the Left continued eating the diet of his ancestors, the boy on the right had adopted the modern diet. You can see the boy on the right is missing quite a few teeth already even at his age, so same genetics.
These are brothers, same genetics, different diet, he was able to correlate- – not all these societies were eating the same foods, like he was studying people in Alaska that were eating a lot of whale blubber, he was studying people in the Swiss Alps that were eating a lot of butter from grass-fed cows, he was studying Aborigines that were eating a lot of bugs.
These people were eating different things but he was looking at them saying, “Okay what about what they’re eating is the same?”
And what he found is that they were eating four times the amount of water-soluble vitamins which is vitamin B, vitamin C- – you’ve heard of those vitamins- – they were eating 10 times the amount of fat soluble vitamins.
So the people who had good dental health and again good dental health translate to good everywhere health. If it looks good here this is going to be healthy as well, this is why everybody talks about Weston Price whether they are dentists or not because what he learned was so crucial, 10 times the amount of fat soluble vitamins.
What are those vitamins? They’re vitamins A, D, E and K. The interesting thing about these vitamins I like to think of them as gatekeepers. So you’re eating this delicious meal of chips and salsa whatever you might be eating, delicious meal of chips and salsa let’s say in those tomatoes there is a good amount of vitamin C.
Well unless you have something that has a fat soluble vitamin in it like let’s say that avocado, if you put an avocado with the tomato, the avocado has some of those fat soluble vitamins. The key is “Fat soluble” it has to be in a fat, makes sense?
You’re going to only find A, D, E and K in a fat food , if you put those together, the vitamin in that fat soluble vitamin, that vitamin in the avocado opens the door of the cell and says come on in vitamin C.
Without that fat soluble vitamin, the vitamin C doesn’t get in, you have to have both and that’s why they were seeing such a difference in oral and overall health in these societies that were eating these fat soluble vitamins, it makes an enormous difference in the way that the body metabolizes and uses nutrients.
Participant: Isn’t that the reason too why when you take a vitamin D, why you need to have K2 as well to add to that vitamin D, vitamin D3 is not going to be absorbed.
Speaker 1: Thank you for saying that because I don’t think I have it in here but there’s actually three guys that play together, calcium, vitamin D and vitamin K. You can eat all the calcium you want in the whole world but if you don’t have vitamin D and vitamin K in your diet you will not get them into your cells.
In fact that’s perfect, that’s exactly what I’m talking about right now, good job Lisa.
The dairy problem
This is a problem with dairy because dairy does the body good right? Milk does a body good, we’ve all been told that on the commercials.
Unfortunately the milk that they were eating in the 1930s with Dr. Weston Price and the milk in our grocery stores today is not the same thing. Pasteurization became a thing some years ago when there was an uptick in infection due to dirty processing at dairies.
There was infection getting in the milk, so they decided the only way to fix this is to heat the milk up high enough that the bacteria are killed. That’s called pasteurization, unfortunately during that pasteurization process it inactivates the enzymes necessary to actually utilize the calcium in the milk.
What happens now is you have this wonderful milk and the calcium is actually not usable by your body anymore because of the pasteurization. It’s killed all the enzymes necessary to utilize it. It creates a whole bunch of free-floating calcium, that just float around knocking around in the body and they find places to land,
They find places like kidneys and create stones, gall bladder and create stones, tartar on your teeth is from free-floating calcium and calcium or calcification in your arteries it’s from this as well. So huge increase in stone formation throughout the body when you have un-absorbable calcium.
And dairy that’s been pasteurized has that in it, this is a hard one, right? This is a hard one, how much dairy is in our diets, in our typical food source? A ton, this is a hard one, the D and the K piece as well, even if you have calcium that’s not- – that does have the enzymes necessary again it free floats unless you have vitamin D which grabs it and vitamin K which puts it in the cell.
You have to have both, vitamin D with vitamin K, there’s two vitamin Ks, don’t get confused because people often do. A lot of times people say vitamin K that’s for blood clotting, I’ve heard of that before that’s vitamin K1. Vitamin K2 is for calcium utilization. It’s a different thing I wish they had not called it the same vitamin because it’s nowhere near the same thing, Weston Price called it activator X.
So in his book if you see he calls it activator X, it’s vitamin K2 that’s what it is we’ve now named it improperly but he knew that there was something going on that had not been named at the time he was studying this.
The grain problem
The grain problem- -and by the way I call this section the doom and gloom section because it makes you depressed about everything you’ve ever eaten in your life, don’t get worried we’re going to talk about some good stuff too.
The grain problem, the problem with grains is that if you take a piece of grain- – I grow a big garden and any seed that I have, I can have a bag of seeds in my food storage, in my cold storage for years, decades. I can still take that seed and I can go put it in the ground and I can plant it and most likely it’s going to grow decades later.
How does it do that? The seed is a little package of growth and it has a sprouting inhibitor on the outside of it that allows that seed to stay in your storage for decades without sprouting. As long as that sprouting inhibitor is on the outside everything on the inside is just waiting for its chance to grow.
What do you do with a seed to make it grow? Water, water mostly right? You can put water in with no soil and it will grow. So you have to get that seed wet. What the water does is it washes off the sprouting inhibitor on the outside of the seed and now everything that’s available for growth inside of that seed takes off, it’s growing.
If you take a piece of wheat or any other grain, corn- -it doesn’t matter what it is and you grind it up and put it in your food, what you’ve added to that food is that sprouting inhibitor, you’ve not washed it off yet.
The sprouting inhibitor binds up everything that’s good in there, the phosphorous, the calcium, the potassium, it binds it up so it’s not usable by your body either.
So you’re feeding yourself great wonderful grains but with the sprouting inhibitor on there, they’re not going to be usable by you, so you have to soak, sprout or ferment a grain and I know it sounds like a lot of work but it’s really not that much work, it’s a lot of planning that’s what it is, it’s a lot of planning it’s a lot of just pre-planning and pre thinking ahead.
Sprout, soak or ferment, soak, sprout or ferment are the three things one of the three things you need to do, you need to just get rid of that sprouting inhibitor, you need to get rid of that and then that grain is just like this storehouse of nutrients for you.
The vegan problem
The vegan problem- – again this is the third of the doom and gloom section we’re almost done. The problem with the vegan diet is what we talked about at the very beginning, the fat soluble vitamins because it’s very hard to find enough fat soluble vitamins if all you’re eating is vegetables because most of them don’t have any fat soluble vitamins in them.
So you have to really work hard to find those sources in other foods and it can be done, it just has to be very intentionally done. You can find it in some seeds, nuts, some foods like an avocado those sorts of things but oftentimes if someone is really struggling with tooth health and they eat a vegan diet I encourage them to add butter or butter oil or bone broth.
Those are typically what I find the easiest- – introducible foods are the things that they’re most acceptable to them or fish oils but not all fish oils will do this for you as well but that’s the problem with a vegan diet.
Cavities are a nutrition problem
Just today I had two patients, one was a woman and one was a man and I looked in their mouth and one was brand-new, one I haven’t seen in nine years. They had cavities just like that picture you see there with the black part around the gum line, brown part at the gum line, they had cavities just like that in almost every single tooth in their mouth.
I looked at them and I said, “This is a nutrition problem.” They said, “What? No this is a cavity problem.” No that is a nutrition problem. What happens is if your body doesn’t have enough nutrients to take care of all of your nutrient needs. So to grow- – to just be you, if your body doesn’t have enough nutrients it will search for them wherever it can find them.
There are some parts of your body, your heart and your brain that take priority because you can’t live without them right? You can’t live without your heart, you can’t live without your brain, so if they need nutrients your body will find them wherever it can find them in order to keep yourself alive.
Well guess what teeth are? They are fabulous storehouse of minerals, if you’re not getting enough minerals your body will steal them from your teeth, the first place that it will steal them from is right down at the gum line because- – remember we go back to that very first picture we showed of the enamel, the dentin.
The enamel is thinnest at the gum line so that’s the most vulnerable place in your mouth is at the thinnest place. So that’s where the cavity is going to start first. And when I look at a mouth when I see cavities all along the gum line, boom nutrition issue, okay how are you eating? That’s where we go first.
Problem absorbing nutrients and why
A lot of times people are eating just fine, it’s not what they’re eating, it’s what they’re digesting, and it’s what they’re absorbing. That’s the second question and I find in our stressed-out environment that we live in, a lot of our bodies are in kind of a stressed-out mode. When we’re in a stressed out mode our stomachs don’t work very well. Stomach gas decreases because if you’re being chased by a lion, do you need to digest your food right then? No you don’t, you need to run and scream and whatever you need.
You need the blood going to your arms, your legs, you don’t need to digest. So if your body is feeling like it’s being chased by a lion right now, it’s not going to digest it’s not creating stomach acid it’s not doing what it needs to do to digest your food.
Our bodies are often running like we’re being chased by a lion, we have virtual Lions all around us all the time, we can’t differentiate between a real lion and between a frequency that’s bombarding us 24/7, our bodies can’t really differentiate between that.
It turns off the digestive process and the stomach acid goes down to the point that it’s not working like it should. Stomach acid is useful to break apart minerals, to break apart proteins which is why we have so- – I believe a huge reason why we have so much gluten problems- – now gluten and dairy problems are great big proteins and we don’t even have enough stomach acid to deal with them, break apart proteins and kill bacteria, kill bugs that we’re consuming.
If we don’t have enough stomach acid we don’t do any of those three things well. We don’t break apart, we don’t digest, we don’t absorb minerals, we don’t absorb proteins and we often get sensitivities to proteins like gluten and dairy and we don’t take care of bugs that might come in with our food.
And so people get issues with the bacteria in their stomachs and you may have heard of SIBO and all these other bacterial issues that people are struggling with, I believe it’s because of these stomach acid issues
Participant: This is caused by the cortisol thing.
Speaker 1: Which is caused by an increase in cortisol, we’re just running too high all the time. We’re running on all the time.
Participant: Cortisol causes belly fat.
Speaker 1: This is Laura’s favorite line, “Cortisol causes belly fat”, thank you Laura for contributing. If you’re too stressed that’s your that’s your indicator right there.
So this I can see from a mile away someone walks in like “Oh you are either not eating well or you’re not absorbing well.” Guaranteed, guaranteed and both these people said, “Where were you 20 years ago?”
And that’s what we used to feel like too- – I didn’t notice 20 years ago, and I couldn’t help you 20 years ago either but we can help you now. So we’re going to help
All right doom-and-gloom part done, now we get to even the worst part, I promise I’ll try to make it fun though.
Okay this is the part you really came for though, this is the part you really want to know. How do we clean up past problems? Some of this is controversial and I’ll be the first to tell you that some of this is controversial, this is what we talked about.
We’ve worked our way toward holistic dentistry, so we talked about nutrition and we talked about hormones, about some of the things that could affect your dental health. Now if you’re already in a mess, what do we do to clean it up? What do we do to fix where you’re at?
The danger of gum disease
The first thing I would like to talk about is gum disease. I love that picture. Back in the 1800s when they are still doing transatlantic and trans-oceanic voyages, sailors were getting scurvy, you’ve probably heard of this right? Sailors were suffering from scurvy.
Well scurvy is a deficiency of vitamin C so what they started doing was taking either pickled limes or lime juice onboard with them and that’s why they call sailors limeys because they had to have lime juice in order to combat scurvy.
As soon as they started taking limes or lime juice onboard they didn’t get scurvy anymore because they got enough vitamin C because on an ocean voyage vitamin C is probably a little hard to come by. Two signs of scurvy were loose teeth and bleeding gums.
So if vitamin C could help scurvy, why can’t vitamin C influence your loose teeth and bleeding gums today? Of course it can, I believe that gum disease is a nutritional disease as well. There are things that sometimes we need to clean off of our teeth.
There is a bacterial component but I think it’s largely nutritional if your body’s not being fed the way it should bacteria will take over and you will get an infection in your mouth. There are hundreds of articles showing the connection between gum disease and overall disease.
This is the most researched area in dentistry is gum disease and you can find probably thousands of articles about this. The correlation between gum disease, heart disease, gum disease cancer, gum disease diabetes, gum disease on and on and on and on and on and on and on.
Alzheimer’s, yep that was actually brand-new, gum disease and Alzheimer’s brand new research showing that. So this is not something you want to mess around with. What do you look for when you see this or what do you notice?
You notice bad breath, sometimes you notice a yucky taste in your mouth, you notice your gums pulling away from the tooth, that’s a big one, bleeding gums. People often say, “Oh my gums bleed just a little.” There’s no such thing as just a little, if you touched my arm right here and it started to bleed just a little would I be worried?
I would hope I’d be worried because it’d be a reason it bled just a little, just a little is enough just a little is enough to worry about. So gum disease is not something to mess around with if you have any of those signs or symptoms bleeding gums, bad breath or your significant other because gum disease is also one of the most transmissible diseases there is.
So if you’re kissing someone who has gum disease, you have it as well. We have a microscope now where we actually swab around people’s mouths and then put it on a microscope and just the other day we were looking at a woman and she had all this bacteria swimming around, nasty dudes and she’s like, “I don’t know where this is from, I don’t know where this is from.”
We said, “Well have you ever been treated for gum disease?” She said, “No, my husband has.” “Oh, I said, you will both be coming in together; we will treat you together because unless we treat both of you will continue to re-infect one another back and forth.”
So it’s very transmissible.
Participant: I need understanding to be clear of the connection between the gum and overall health, is it just the bacteria, is it a chicken and egg situation or one affects the other?
Speaker 1: Yes, very much so chicken and egg kind of situation in regards to diabetes because what they found is that people with periodontal disease have a very difficult time keeping their blood Sugar’s in control and vice versa.
People who have a hard time keeping their blood sugar’s in control are more likely to have periodontal disease so again which one started first. I believe it’s a bacterial component yes but I also believe it’s an immune system issue because this is a chronic disease; it’s a chronic infection that the body has to constantly be 24/7 on guard for.
If it’s constantly on guard something else crops up, it can’t deal with it nearly as well because it’s fatigued that’s worn out it doesn’t have nearly the strength that it did at one time. I think it’s both, I think it’s bacteria that spreads everywhere but I also think it’s an immune issue.
And they’re actually- – we’ll talk about this in a minute but there was a new study in 2017 that showed people who died of heart attacks they biopsied I think there was something like – -I can’t remember the number of people- – a lot of people that had died that it was a fatal heart attack, they biopsied, the clot that actually killed them and 75% of those people had mouth specific bacteria in the clot that killed them.
So these bacteria are not ones to be trifled with. They will go places that will kill you.
Participant: So you know you have it if you blood when you floss?
Speaker 1: When you brush your teeth, bleed when you floss, bleed, bleed, inflammation yep. If you spit and there’s blood in the sink, yep there’s something going on.
Participant: So you say there is a direct connection between the gum disease and Alzheimer’s?
Speaker 1: Yep.
Participant: There is also a direct connection between statin drugs and Alzhmeirs, is there a connection between statin drugs and gum disease?
Speaker 1: Well my theory is why is the person on statin drugs? To me that’s where the correlation goes back to most likely, is why is the person on statin drugs? I believe that people are on statin drugs so much now because cholesterol is being used by our bodies for other things.
It’s not being utilized well, everybody’s running that high sympathetic overload, cortisol uses cholesterol, all these things use cholesterol you take statin drugs turn off that cholesterol production, all of a sudden you now can’t make cortisol.
Now all of a sudden you can’t make the other hormones that require cholesterol as a precursor your body is now not running well at all. Can it defend itself against bacteria or other things that come along? No, because you kind of tied one hand behind its back, does it make sense?
Like the statin drug, so I think yes that the statin drug- – I don’t think it’s the drug itself that probably caused the Alzheimer’s, it’s the lack of cholesterol that causes the Alzheimer’s. The brain is largely fats.
The brain is largely fats, if you stop creating fats, what’s going to protect your brain? It’s the insulation.
Participant: In general whenever you take a medication, it does not matter what medication it is, it creates interference somewhere else in the body and usually we just wait for the other problem to occur, that is why we can talk about side effects and damage to other parts of the body.
So it’s anytime-
Speaker 1: Somebody defined side effect for me and it made so much sense all of a sudden. So when we take a drug, any drug doesn’t matter what it is, even if it’s in our herbal medication it doesn’t matter what it is, if we take a substance it will affect every cell in our body.
It has an intended effect that’s the reason you’re taking that supplement that drug that whatever- – the intended effect it also has a side effect meaning it’s affecting everything. Every cell you hoped it affected and every cell you had no clue it affected that’s all a side effect is.
It’s just simply the effect it has on the other cells in the body that you didn’t intend for it to affect.
Participant: The medication is always very localized, that is why you have this specialists, however, our system is a system and our whole body is a system-
Speaker 1: It all works together, it’s going to affect everything whether it was intended to or not. It can’t it will affect every cell. You had a question or comment?
Participant: I was just going to say, what statin does is it shuts off the cholesterol being made by the liver, so it does have effects on cholesterol.
Speaker 1: A hundred percent it does. So then all the side effects are that everything that requires cholesterol is now no longer going to function very well, absolutely and why are we so high on cholesterol? Like I was saying, it’s because we’re stressed out, our body- – cholesterol is an insulator, it’s just an insulator, it’s trying to insulate us from what we’re bombarded with.
The more things- – toxins, environmental issues that we present our body with, the more cholesterol it’s going to create because it’s trying to protect us. When we shut it off, we’ve basically taking away that opportunity for it to protect us anymore, so doesn’t protect our brain.
This is very near and dear to me because my mother-in-law speaking of she’s been on a statin drug probably since they were invented at least 30 years, at least 30 years she’s been on statin drugs and I’ve tried to take her off multiple times but I’m not a “doctor”.
So she doesn’t go off of them but she is in early stages of dementia right now and it breaks my heart and it was her biggest fear because that’s what happened to her mother too.
I just think her brain doesn’t work anymore because she’s turned off all the insulation for 30 years how can we expect it to? Very near and dear to my heart there.
Oil pulling, what is oil pulling? Have you guys heard of oil pulling? That’s great, it’s great, it’s been around for bazillion years, it’s wonderful it doesn’t work? Actually it does. The reason is every single bacterium in your mouth- – so again we’re kind of- – we forgot where we were for just a moment that was a good segue.
Gum disease how do we take care of it? One of the things you can do at home is to do oil pulling because every bacteria, every cell, has what’s called a lipid layer. This goes back to biology class. Basically the outside of every cell is made of fats, that’s just the way they’re made.
If you put a fat in your mouth- – I like to do coconut oil because it doesn’t taste like much- – if you put a fat in your mouth and you start to swish it around, fats are attracted to one another. It will attract the fatty membrane of that bacteria and suck it up into that fat glob.
You swish it around- – and it’s not going to take every bacteria in the mouth because you can’t, there’s billions in there and you don’t want it to but it’s going to help you balance the biome. The biome is kind of a popular word now but it’s going to balance the bacteria that are living in there.
Do you need to oil pull every day? No, oil pull for four or five days to get yourself up to speed, get your mouth balanced and then I do it every four or five days is all I do. I don’t do it every day but I have learned the hard way just spit it into a toilet paper and throw it away. Don’t spit it down your sink because you’ll clog your sink and don’t spit it on your lawn because you’ll kill your lawn.
Ask me how I know that? If you want to know what’s in there just spit it on your lawn for a few days and see what the lawn does. It’s full of nasties.
Mercury in dental fillings
Next thing is mercury. In Total Care Academy, this Academy that I’m starting for dentists this is our first module.
The first thing we’re learning and the reason is because how many people have silver fillings in this world? So many people, those silver fillings are 50% mercury, they are are 50% mercury when they went in, they are 50% mercury the day they come out and every day in between. They are 50% mercury when they started putting them in the 1800’s, they were 50% mercury today as they’re still being placed in mouths in dental offices in the United States.
Participant: Statistics about those that work in the dental industry it’s not just only you that it is going to affect.
Speaker 1: A 100%, yeah, everybody.
Participant: I guess fertility is one of them.
Speaker 1: Fertility, yep is a mercury symptom, absolutely it’s the dental assistant that sits next to the dentist suctioning up the mercury as well. It’s everybody and it’s every patient that walks in the office when a mercury procedure has actually gone on.
You walk in the office in the same office that something’s been drilled out and well you’re going to breathe it in, so it happens all the time. What do we do here? We do safe amalgam removal procedures. When we remove them, we dress up like this and it’s not that fun because it’s kind of hot but I kind of like the hats because then nobody knows if my hair looks good or not. There are some things that we do and we follow every single time to make sure that we all stay safe.
Interesting thing is that mercury- -the only problem with it is not just that it doesn’t do good things for your health that actually really causes problems with teeth. If you think about a bottle let’s say you want to open up a bottle and it’s stuck you know you got the pickle jar and you can’t get the pickle jar lid off and you’re trying to turn it what do you do is that you tap it right but that that doesn’t work what do you do?
Hot water, okay why do you put it under hot water? Expands the metal and it makes the lid come off. So what does a mercury filling do in your mouth when you drink something hot or eat a hot soup or something like that?
It expands, okay, then you eat something cold right after and it contracts. This is inside the tooth, you can see the pictures here, you can see the cracks that are going down from those fillings because what it does is it ends up cracking the tooth.
As a dentist I cannot tell you that removing your mercury fillings will cure any of your health issues, I cannot promise you that and I cannot tell you that that could be a possibility nothing like that. I can tell you that the mercury filling is cracked your tooth, I can tell you that there’s a cavity underneath that filling, I can tell you that it’s leaking, that the bacteria are getting it.
I can tell you all those things I can also tell you that mercury is the most neurotoxic, non-radioactive element on the planet but it’s more neurotoxic than arsenic or lead. I can tell you that when you’re chewing on those fillings you are releasing mercury 24 hours a day.
I can tell you that when you’re brushing temperature changes you’re releasing more mercury, I can tell you all these things. The reason I can’t tell you that it will make you sick is because of the place we live. If the FDA or the ADA were ever to say that mercury fillings contributed to disease every single dentist that has ever placed a dental filling would be under a class-action lawsuit because of the country we live in and the litigious society we work in, it would just happen.
So every dentist including myself would now be sued. They will never change their stance, it will never happen, it just won’t. That means we have to educate and teach each other and help each other know what’s going on because those governmental agencies will never change their stance on it.
There are some countries that have- – Sweden, Austria, Denmark and Norway have all banned amalgam fillings. Isn’t that interesting? But the United States, no. We still place them in everybody.
Participant: How many dentists have educated themselves on this?
Speaker 1: Many dentists don’t, I would say about 50% of dentists consider themselves mercury-free. So there’s a difference, so there is mercury free which means they don’t place them anymore, there is mercury safe which means they remove them safely when removing them. There’s a difference.
The problems with root canals
All right, just when we got through all the good news, we have a little bit more, this is the worst I know. I don’t like this part either. So a root canal is simply a root filling, a filling in the area where the nerve died.
You remember that picture? that’s why I said that picture was so important at the very beginning of how and the anatomy of a tooth works that nerve goes down the very center of the tooth, if that tooth gets a large enough cavity trauma something like that happens and that nerve actually dies.
A root canal procedure is done for a good reason, we can keep the tooth, so we save the tooth and the tooth will stop hurting, you remove the dead nerve tissue and fill it in with a filling material. The idea is fabulous and I wish it worked every time because it’s great we get to keep the teeth.
Unfortunately all of those little pores- – remember those pores I talked about? That the fluids goes through- – all of those pores there’s no way to ever sterilize and clean all those little pores. We can clean that main nerve- -and I did root canals for 15 years, we can clean that main nerve in the center of the tooth out and we can fill it up nicely and we use a disinfectant called bleach to do that.
It kills all the bacteria inside of there, works great, unfortunately all those little pores there’s no way to possibly ever clean all of the tissue out of there or all of the bacteria out of there. So what we find is that later in life, sometimes very quickly later sometimes we see people that they say, “I have this root canal done in May, in September and they’re dying still I’ve never ever healed.
Some say, “I have had this root canal for 15 years. “ It doesn’t hurt often times. But what that infection does is it continues to grow and fester around the tooth and it typically destroys bone around the tooth and if it just stayed there we maybe could even live with that but it doesn’t just stay there, it goes throughout the body everywhere.
And that’s actually the study that- -I wonder if I have it here- – I can’t remember, that’s actually the study with the heart attacks is they were studying root canals specific bacteria and found them in 75% of fatal heart attacks.
Root canals are very much a worrisome thing and I see failed root canals every single day in practice. And typically, well I would say about a third of those have forced their way out of the bone and have created a huge area of bone loss and are draining into the rest of the body constantly.
What do you do about it? That’s the hard part right? I recommend typically remove the root canal tooth because get rid of that source of infection, we replace them if at all possible with a dental implant, a ceramic dental implant or something removable if that works better or we just don’t always leave them out.
Plenty people go around without a tooth there and they are okay but I used to tell people I will save a tooth at any cost. Now I’ll tell people I will save your health even if it means losing a tooth that’s more important.
Participant: What about the work that has been done regarding laser therapy?
Speaker 1: Yes, in root canals, yes, in fact I have a laser that does it, it’s called sweeps technique and the idea is fabulous, the problem is again, it’s not completely cleaned out and they’re still dead tissue and some bacteria still congregates but there’s been a lot of advances in a lot of work because we are all tired of pulling teeth, we don’t want to pull teeth if we don’t have to.
Lots of advances in this area and I foresee that things are going to change but the traditional root canal has been in your mouth for 10 years most likely has a problem because it wasn’t done with these techniques, these things weren’t done when it was done.
That’s the problem, it is cleaning up all the past issues
Participant: You talked about direct correlation with our heart diseases and stuff with root canals. Is there other correlations based on which tooth you have root canal because I know every one of your teeth is related to different organs?
Speaker 1: Very much so, yes. So she’s asking about is there a correlation between a specific tooth and what we’re seeing systemically with health in regards to these root canal teeth and also in regards to those metal fillings too and these bony cavitation’s.
The body is interesting, you probably have all heard of acupuncture, acupressure and know a little bit about that and sometimes people start to think about like lava lamps and hippies when they start talking that sort of way.
But I want to take it out of that realm because it’s not. When your phone dies what do you do with it? Plug it in, plug it into the wall. So how do you plug in, how do you charge? Sleep? Sleep is one of the things, what happens when you sleep?
When you sleep your body uses the nutrients you consumed to go and rebuild all the buildings that you destroyed during the day. It’s using all the nutrients you have. Food is one of the ways that you recharge, food gives yourself the building blocks.
The other way we recharge is through muscle movement. When we move our muscles, the muscles themselves actually have what’s called fascia around the outside. If you’ve ever cut up chicken you know what I’m talking about, it’s that kind of a silvery stuff around the meat, we have the same thing around our meat and that fascia connects to one another.
This muscle may be connected to this muscle with that fascia and each of the organs in our body is connected to one of those muscle fascial bundles as well. Let’s say we move this muscle it charges our liver, each muscle bundle recharges different organ systems in our body.
The teeth are also organs, they have a vascular system, they have a nutrient system, they are organs just like any other organ and every single tooth is on one of those fascial bundle lines, one of those muscle lines, interesting thing.
I’m thinking, okay if I designed a body maybe I’d make all the teeth on one line, right? It’s not the way we were designed. Somebody else designed us and the way it works is that every single line in the body has a tooth on it, isn’t that interesting?
I’ve heard one person say, “Of course we’ll never know.” Well we may know someday but so we won’t know right now why but I’ve heard it hypothesized that perhaps because when we chew you stimulate that muscle bundle as well, that fascial bundle.
Chewing may actually be a source of recharging because we’re stimulating that line every time we chew. Every tooth is on a line and every line has a tooth on it, so there’s huge correlation, there’s a lot of studies that have showed things like 70% of breast cancer- – people who have breast cancer have a root canal on the same side on the same line as that breast.
Participant: What about an extraction? If you take it all out there is no infection but then-
Speaker 1: If you remove it- -you have asked a very good question. If you have an infection in that line you’ve created a short in that line. Any kind of failed root canal, mercury filling anything of that sort in that line will create a short on everything else in that line.
We’ll see a lot of digestive problems with an upper molar root canal because it’s on the same line and these things have been tested, these things are just like, “Something is wrong, I think maybe that molar is connected to my large intestine.”
They’ve actually studied these things and they can measure them. There is a German physician named Reinhard Voll that tested and measured voltage coming out of all of these places and figured out exactly where everything’s connected and amazingly enough it lined up quite accurately with Chinese acupressure, acupuncture points, all of those things have been studied for thousands of years.
These things are real, if you have a short and a tooth you will short what else is on that line. If you remove this short, you will open up that line again, however you have lost the stimulation. There are multiple teeth on one line.
Meaning, the back molars are on the same line together. The upper molars are on the same line together, if you’ve lost both molars we need to replace one that makes sense?
Participant: Replace it with a?
Speaker 1: An implant, if you do an implant you will- – a ceramic implant, a metal implant will actually create a short.
Speaker 1: Metal will be titanium. I have a titanium implant myself right here, right here in my head.
Speaker 1: Turn your cell phone off, it is a whole another talk. I do not think that I have that information in here. There’s a whole problem that’s coming up in orthopedics right now. In just the last- -about five years there have been about a thousand articles published in the orthopedic research showing problems with titanium joints.
The problem is- – we’re talking hips, knees, shoulders anything that’s been replaced with titanium, the problem is that when you put- – why don’t you put a metal pan in a microwave? You get a short, it’s going to spark right? It’s going to heat that metal up and you’re going to get all that- – I did this once.
I know what this looks like without thinking, without knowing what I was doing. The frequency of the microwave- – that’s what a microwave is, it’s a wave, the frequency of that microwave heats up the metals.
Well the frequencies of cell phones, Wi-Fi, of all the things that are around us, also are waves, also heat up metals. So what they’re finding in research is that the cellphone frequencies are heating up titanium four to five degrees.
What that’s doing is it’s killing the bone surrounding that titanium joint replacement and they’re losing titanium joints at an alarming rate. It also includes dental metal implants which I have one of myself wearing it anywhere you can’t go anywhere in this world anymore without being bombarded by cellphone radiation, you cannot.
There are ways to protect yourself, there are things you can put on your body, there are- – I have a shirt that I wear when I fly, I mean there’s ways- – and we’re getting better, in fact my son’s right now are creating a company for this because I think there is such a lack in the education and it’s going to be such a need in the future but the interesting thing I find is that the orthopedic world is where all the research is coming in for this because they’ve placed so many more metal parts than dentists have but it extrapolates the information transfers over to dentistry the same way.
Participant: What about dentures?
Speaker 1: Dentures, there’s pros and cons, you don’t have the metals, pro, totally pro. You don’t have to worry about this titanium issue, all those sorts of things, it’s the meridians that are the problem. Those fascial lines aren’t getting stimulated the same way that they should be so that’s where you see the problems with dentures.
Participant: So how do you find a way to stimulate them?
Speaker 1: You can place dental implants in strategic locations that you can activate certain meridians because the dental implants will activate those, the right dental implants.
Participant: What about exercise, does that help at all?
Speaker 1: For sure and good nutrition. Exercise, moving your muscles and good nutrition those are the two main things. It’ll help, moving your muscles and good nutrition.
Unhealed areas in the bone after tooth removal
All right we have got to talk about the last bad thing here. A tooth has a ligament around it. our teeth has a ligament around it and I tell people it’s kind of like a placenta and a baby when the baby’s born the placenta doesn’t come just on its own, same thing happens with the tooth.
When the tooth is removed, the ligament doesn’t just come on its own, it has to be removed specifically in order for that to be gone. If the ligament isn’t removed the body doesn’t realize that there’s been a tooth removed so it caps off the hole with gums.
The gums grow over but the bone doesn’t because they’re still a tooth there, I don’t need to grow any bone, it takes about two weeks for the body to clue in, “Okay the tooth’s gone.” Well by that time I mean if you cut your hand how long does it take for it to heal pretty well? Pretty fast ,right?
Yeah a few days I ran into my peach tree on Friday embedded my peach tree into my head right up here, that was Friday and today’s Thursday so six days later, it’s almost gone. It’s still sore but it’s almost gone.
So in six days’ time the gum will have grown in and totally filled in where that tooth came out. It doesn’t leave a space for the bone to grow in once the bone kicks into gear and goes “Oh there’s a tooth gone, okay ligaments dead now.”
The hole fills in with gum tissue and never really fills in with very good bone. That gum tissue attracts bacteria, it has a dead ligament in there and that area is like a cesspool of bacteria and not just bacteria, it’s a cesspool of microbes.
We find these on these dental specific CT scans. So now we take a dental CT scan on every patient because I see so many things. Today one of those patients that was so frustrated today he said, “Why, I go to my dentist every six months, why have they not seen this?”
He had a massive abscess tooth and I said, “Because the traditional dental x-rays show us this portion, they show us the chewing portion that’s all we see in a traditional every six month x-ray, it’s called a bitewing. It shows the chewing portion, it doesn’t show down in the bone, doesn’t show the root, it doesn’t show these things.”
I don’t know how long this man has had an abscess, years most likely and its massive, its destroyed so much bone, he probably can’t ever put an implant in there now. And he was so mad, “Why do they not know, I’ve been going every six months?’
I said, “It’s because the x-rays they’re using don’t show it.” That’s why we use these CT scans. They show me everything in the whole head, the whole, everything, we can see what’s going on, that’s where we find these cavitations ,that’s where we find these unhealed areas in the bone.
And there’s a specific way I can manipulate the CT scan that shows me is the bone healed or not? If it’s not, what we recommend is opening into that area, cleaning it out really well and then disinfecting it and placing what’s called PRF which is from your blood, it’s has stem cells and growth factors.
We do a blood draw, spin it out and those areas heal finally. We have biopsied a lot of these and have found HPV virus, cytomegalovirus, parasites across the board bacteria like you can’t believe scary kinds of things coming out of these.
This is a sinkhole in essence that things congregate. When people tell me, “I have such little energy, I cannot get my adrenals back on board again, I just don’t feel like myself anymore.” The first place I look is this right here because this is where you get those chronic infectious loads that your body can’t take care of, it can never heal this, we have to help clean it out first.
Now the happy part, this is the healing teeth part.
Participant: What number are those cavitation’s because of people having wisdom teeth?
Speaker 1: The large majority because how many people get their wisdom teeth out? Any tooth that comes out, so if you think eighty to eighty-five percent of people probably get their wisdom teeth out 80 85 percent of people potentially have cavitation’s where their wisdom teeth were removed, large majority of people have that.
Participant: because their ligaments werent removed?
Speaker 1: Yep, but it’s not ever done.
Participant: What about someone who has dentures, so they have all the teeth pulled, so there is a potential of all of that as well?
Speaker 1: I saw a gentleman just- -was it last week? I believe it was last week, he has cavitation’s pretty much from corner to corner, top to bottom.
Participant: How has it affected him
Speaker 1: No without a CT, he feels terrible. Like his physical health feels terrible and it’s been since he got the teeth pulled and the dentures in, he feels terrible and now we know why.
Participant: So would you suggest people don’t get their wisdom teeth out if they are not causing problems?
Speaker 1: Good question, so the question is if they’re not causing problems what does that really mean? If they’ve never come in and they’re looking like they’re not ever going to come in- -sometimes there’s just not room for them, then they may be fine, my one caveat to that is what if they start to come in at age 40 and now the roots are long and now it’s causing infection and now there’s worry of nerve damage when that tooth is removed?
That’s the problem and so they really need to be analyzed and say “Okay, is there room in here? Can they be kept clean if they’re already in can they be kept clean.
Participant: You cannot say yes or no?
Speaker 1: You have got to look and if they are removed we would take these extra steps, we will remove that ligament when the tooth is removed so that this cavitation doesn’t form. So the body heals the way it should.
Participant: So are you guys doing that now, the other dentist that-
Speaker 1: Right here Dr. Jones, he’s our wisdom tooth guy now he’s just joining us because we needed to be able to answer that question.
How to heal teeth
Okay, how to heal teeth. Let’s get to the happy place because we’re almost – -okay can we heal teeth? Absolutely you can heal teeth, the important part again is to remember this picture. How many times have we gone back to this picture?
This picture, the outside layer of the tooth the enamel is the mineral layer, so if your body needs minerals for some other function, it will pull minerals from the enamel and take it somewhere else and you’ll get a cavity.
If you add minerals back to your body in enough amount that you have enough for everything else and to feed your teeth, then your teeth will get minerals back in.
It’s called remineralization, you can remineralize teeth, kids can remineralize teeth, there’s ways to do it. The key is what layer is the cavity in? If the cavities all the way to the pulp good luck, I hope you can heal it but it’s a lot likely that you’re going to be able to because in that dent and all those pores the bacteria have spread everywhere so you got to kill bacteria as well as seal the tooth as well as provide enough nutrients to heal it.
When it’s in the enamel layer, it’s a lot easier, so when it’s small these are healable you have to have minerals available to do it. So people will say, “Well how about fluoride what do we do with fluoride, will fluoride help?”
The trouble with fluoride
Well fluoride will help if it only touches the tooth. Fluoride makes a stronger crystal, it’s proven that’s exactly what it does. Unfortunately fluoride also will make a stronger crystal a change the crystal in hip or any other bone in your body.
Tooth is okay to be stronger and more brittle that’s what fluoride does, it makes it stronger more brittle a stronger and more brittle hip is not a good thing. So a more brittle hip often times they’re finding now high fluoride areas are leading to higher hip fractures, higher incidences of hip fractures because of the fluoride.
That’s problem number one, problem number two is that fluoride- – going back to your high school chemistry class- – fluoride is in the same place in the periodic table as bromine, iodine, chlorine, those are all the same, they’re called halides.
Iodine is necessary to activate thyroid hormone that’s what activates- – turns thyroid hormone from inactive to active. Fluoride and iodine are similar enough that fluoride will bind to an inactive thyroid hormone and activate it, it looks activated but it’s not usable by your body.
Fluoride is a bully, so if you get fluoride and iodine into a fistfight, fluoride is going to win every single time. Fluoride is going to beat the iodine out of those thyroid hormones and will activate it but it’s not usable.
You’ll find people who have thyroid symptoms, low thyroid symptoms but their tests come back completely normal because the thyroid hormone has been activated by fluoride rather than iodine. So they’re calling this now type 2 hypothyroidism and supposing that it possibly is because of fluoride.
Now do you just get fluoride? Where do you get a fluoride? You have fluoride in toothpaste, oftentimes you get fluoride in a mouth rinse, a lot of places in Utah have fluoridated water. You can call the water department for your city to find out if yours is, a large majority of them are now.
Any processed, pre-prepared food that has water in it has probably been prepared with fluoridated water, mostly juices are made with fluoridated water if they’re made from concentrates so fluoride is ubiquitous in our society now.
You have to be really careful don’t have fluoride in your toothpaste make sure you’re using a fluoride filter on your water you’ve got to get it out if you want to keep your bones strong and you want to keep your thyroid working well.
Participant: And a filter even for bathing in it, we drink non chlorinated my kids are bathing in it.
Speaker 1: Exactly right, there is-
Speaker 1: And remember the spill that happened in Murray, just a few months ago, their fluoride levels were so high it pulled the rust from the pipes and people were starting to get brown water and complained about it because it was cleaning all of the rust out of the pipes, interesting I’ve never heard that one before.
Participant: If the people knew the reason that they are making these decisions that has an effect on our health, again there is no opportunity to sue the company or the state for allowing that too.
Speaker 1: Well the interesting thing about fluoride is it’s the only thing out of the water that treats the person. Did you think about that? That treats the person, chlorine is added to water to treat what? The water, treat the water, fluoride is added to the water to treat the person, not the pipes.
I joke and tell people would we be okay if they just decided that we were all too depressed and they really needed to add antidepressants to our water? They already do? Unfortunately they may already be doing that.
But if they were added purposefully we wouldn’t be okay with that right because some of us may already be on antidepressants, now we’re overdosed. Some of us may not need antidepressant ,why does my child need antidepressants in the same amount than I do?
That’s the argument you come with fluoride we’re all getting it whether we need it or not whether we’re getting other sources or not my kids getting the same amount as I am, why are we doing that? It doesn’t make any sense.
End of the story is really you are the key to holistic dentistry and changes in holistic health care because you knowing these things and asking for things to change is the only way it’s going to happen, the only way it’s going to happen.
You being educated and knowing what’s happening to your bodies is your greatest level of ownership and so that’s why we are doing these things we’re just trying to help people know just trying to help people know what’s going on teach them what’s going on so that you can keep yourself healthy.
You can keep your body going the way it should and then hopefully teach someone else. Take it to someone else and teach someone else too. And we hope to be a resource for you through these classes, we have a whole lineup of things coming up in the next few months, we hope to be a resource to you in a lot of different areas.
Next courses
I don’t even know what all the classes are- – “sleep problems be killing you, what the heck do I eat, cutting through the diet hype, gum health is it affecting your well-being? What’s the fuss about fermenting? Healthy cosmetic dentistry and do people eat as a family in today’s world?”
Those are all the classes through the end of December, we hope again just to be a resource and we’re live streaming, we’re videoing, we are doing all this for these courses to just be source of information and hopefully you’ll share it and we’ll all teach each other and get better because of it.
Participant: If we want to share this with someone how do we access-
Speaker 1: We’ll put it somewhere, we’re going to record it and then we’re going to put it somewhere, probably a YouTube channel and we’ll have a link to our website.
Participant: Were on Facebook live right now, so if you go to our Facebook page you can still see it.
Speaker 1: There is your answer.
Participant: You can always call us and I will just send you the link, so all you have to do is push a button.
Speaker 1: Okay good, any other questions?
Participant: I just want to understand, fluoride is a poison, a very toxic poison so a little bit of it is okay, the question I want to ask.
Speaker 1: So what I believe and what I’ve seen scientifically is that if you can get the fluoride to stay right where you put it, it actually will strengthen that tooth crystal unfortunately it’s really hard to get it to stay right there because you swallow it, all sorts of things.
It is good for your tooth, it will make your teeth stronger, unfortunately it is damaging to everything else. So that’s the tricky part that’s really why I don’t use it in my practice either because I can’t get it to stay put that’s the trouble.
Participant: Even if you could get it to stay put with all the pores, it is going to go everywhere, is that it?
Speaker 1: Yes it is. So that’s why we talked about nutrition, that’s why we talk about remineralizing, that’s what we talked about these other ways to help heal teeth and get them stronger so we don’t have to depend on fluoride.
Participant: Anything about orthodontic care?
Speaker 1: Good question so the biggest thing that I see bad with orthodontic care- – post orthodontic care because I see a lot of adults that have had orthodontics that have maybe caused some issues- – is the jaw, this area here- – and this is where we’re going to talk about in some of the next course about sleep actually- – is very instrumental in the way we breathe and the amount of oxygen we are able to get.
If during orthodontic care, teeth are removed- – that was a big thing about 20-30 years ago, they take teeth out to make teeth fit in better, a lot of people have teeth removed for braces. When you have teeth removed for braces, it closes up the airway and I think that that’s why- – I mean you probably have all heard the things about does your husband snore? You know, there’s so many commercials right now about sleep apnea and all these things.
I think a huge piece of that is because all those people that had teeth pulled out for braces are now in their 60s and now they’re not breathing and it’s because this is so closed down and they’re starting to see the health effects of it.
Orthodontics should never remove teeth, that’s a big deal and palatal expansion is the thing that needs to happen, we need a bigger airway, more breathing space, all of that we should never constrict and close things down in orthodontics.
Post orthodontics, I also see problems with joints because orthodontics typically puts teeth where there are pretty because that’s what mom paid for. You want a great looking smile when you leave, fortunately pretty doesn’t always fit.
We encourage people, post orthodontics to come and let us balance the bite a little bit and make it fit as well as look pretty too. We do that, we do bite balancing to help things fit together after braces because they don’t always fit and then sometimes you know early 20s start getting headaches- – I especially see this in girls, early 20s start getting headaches start getting facial pain don’t know why.
It’s post orthodontics because the teeth don’t fit and it causes the jaw musculature to spaz does not feel good. So you have to finish the right way too.
And there is something called healthy start which is great for children to direct the growth, so that hopefully we can prevent the need for orthodontics. So if you have a young child this is an appliance that you wear that helps direct the growth of the jaws to create that natural open airway to get rid of kids snore too.
And kids snoring is just an obstructed airway, they’re not breathing like they should, no wonder they have ADHD and can’t focus in school because they didn’t breathe all night long. So this healthy start helps to direct the growth of the jaws and the airway and everything so that hopefully they can even not need orthodontics in the future. So everything grows the correct way from the beginning.
We have a doctor here that does it as well, he’s phenomenal we’ve tried to pull these pieces in at least knowledge bases people that can do- -because it’s so essential.
Any other questions?
Participant: The remineralization that you are talking about, adding to smoothies and stuff.
Speaker 1: You have got to get minerals in some way you need to absorb them so you need to have enough stomach acid to actually break them apart. So whatever way works for you to get your minerals in, I love it in a liquid form that’s my favorite because I think it’s the most absorbable, the most uptakeable through your gut system.
Yeah but you’re not going to have everything in Himalayan salt I like a fulvic humic acid it’s basically dirt I tell people it’s like drinking dirt water, it’s my favorite. Drink a little dirt water, you’re going to get all the minerals you need, not real dirt water but you can drink dirt water if you want but there’s supplements that it’s called humic and fulvic acid and it’s from the earth basically.
It’s minerals from the earth that are going to be more absorbable so you just got to have them in high amounts.
Participant: Clear out the stuff that takes them out like bacteria , stress and things like that.
Speaker 1: Then the body works better and the stomach acid kicks back in again and we’re constantly fighting this battle of the stress response, constantly fighting that battle. Thank you all for coming!
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