Oral Health: The Root of the Matter
Welcome to the world of biologic dentistry! Meet your host, Dr. Rachaele Carver, who presents a comprehensive overview of biologic dentistry and interviews amazing holistic, functional medicine doctors and health practitioners. Dr. Rachaele Carver, D.M.D. is a Board-Certified, Biologic, Naturopathic Dentist & Certified Health Coach.
She owns and practices at Carver Family Dentistry in North Adams, Mass. She is on a mission to provide the best quality holistic dentistry available and educate the world about biologic dentistry.
Learn from one of the best biologic holistic dentists in the country easy, effective methods of improving your dental and oral health and how to use this to improve your overall health!
Did you know that many people with a chronic or recurring disease or physical condition can be greatly helped by improving their oral health?
Find out how biologic dentistry can help with disease prevention or eradication. Become your own oral health advocate! Find the best dentist for you.
Listen and share with your family and friends!
Oral Health: The Root of the Matter
2. Biologic Dentistry 101 + Find the Best Dentist for You!
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Enter the world of biologic dentistry!
In this episode, your host, Dr. Rachaele Carver, presents a comprehensive overview of biologic dentistry and how you can benefit from it.
Dr. Rachaele Carver, D.M.D. is a Board-Certified, Biologic, Naturopathic Dentist & Certified Health Coach.
Dr. Carver owns and practices at Carver Family Dentistry in North Adams, Mass. She is on a mission to provide the best quality holistic dentistry available to her patients.
Learn from one of the best biologic holistic dentists in the country easy, effective methods of improving your dental and oral health and how to use this to improve your overall health!
In this episode, Dr. Carver shares actionable insights you probably have never heard of or even thought to ask about. Oral health not only affects the health and appearance of our teeth and mouth but is actually the start of digestive health and affects numerous systems in the body, including cardiovascular health; additionally, it can tell you what systems in the body are unhealthy or need support.
To contact Dr. Carver directly, contact her via email at drcarver@carverfamilydentistry.com.
To learn more about holistic dentistry and find a biologic Dentist located near you check out her patient education page:
http://carverfamilydentistry.com/patient-education-library/
Want to talk with someone? Call her practice: 413-663-7372
Episode sneak peek:
Learn what to do about cavities and the best way to ensure your teeth and oral health positively affect your overall health.
Did you know that many people with a chronic or recurring disease or physical condition can be greatly helped by improving their oral health? Find out how biologic dentistry can help with disease prevention or eradication.
Become your own oral health advocate!
Find the best dentist for you.
Listen and share with your family and friends!
Highlights:
How to prevent gum disease
Health starts in the mouth
The cause of disease
Teeth are circuit breakers
Every tooth is an organ
Fluoride: friend or foe?
Root canals. When are they needed?
Heart health & your teeth
Why you grind your teeth
Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. Information discussed is not intended for diagnosis, curing, or prevention of any disease and is not intended to replace advice given by a licensed healthcare practitioner. Opinions from guests are their own, and this podcast does not condone or endorse opinions made by guests. This podcast and its guests may have direct or indirect financial interests associated with products mentioned.
Biologic Dentistry 101 + Find the Best Dentist for You!
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Root of the Matter podcast with Dr. Rachel Carver. I am your host today, and we're gonna start our first podcast talking about what exactly is biologic dentistry? Why does it matter? How did I get involved in this philosophy of dentistry? It started about 11, 12 years ago when I started to have my own health issues.
[00:00:23] I developed eczema all. My hands, so you can imagine as a dentist, very frustrating, difficult, having to wash my hands, pull gloves on and off. It was very frustrating. I had two young babies. It was hard. I couldn't let them hold my hand or give them a bath. It was just all very, very uncomfortable. And of course, I went to the dermatologist and they just wanted me to be on steroid creams basically for the rest of my life.
[00:00:45] And immune system altering drugs, which at age 30, I was not comfortable with. . So I just went down the path of trying to research and, and understand again, how the body works and why my skin was showing up this eczema. I knew there had to be a reason and I just wanted to figure out exactly what it was.
[00:01:06] And, um, while I was figuring out my own, uh, systemic health issues, it made me think about dentistry a little bit differently and could I be doing dentistry differently? So I took a lot of different courses and really, really understood how things that are happening in the. Are a result of what could be happening systemically or vice versa.
[00:01:25] And the, you know, the head is connected to the rest of the body. The same blood that is flowing through our teeth is flowing through the rest of our body. So it's really important that we take a more holistic view of our health. If we wanna have excellent oral health, uh, we have to have excellent systemic health and vice versa.
[00:01:42] So my goal with this podcast is to introduce to you a lot of the. Talk about this information and make you your best own doctor. I believe dentistry is 100% preventable. And so if we are empowered with the knowledge, we will be our best doctors and create excellent health for ourselves. So let's dive in to our uh, program here today.
[00:02:10] So we're gonna talk about what exactly is biologic dentistry, the differences from traditional dentistry. Some main concepts and then how do you find the right one? So biologic dentistry is not a separate, um, specialty. Okay. It is more of a philosophy and it's this philosophy of the linking oral disease to systemic health and supporting a team approach.
[00:02:32] Okay. We have to use, you know, not just our dentist and our internist, but maybe the GI doc and, um, some other specialties to make sure that we, um, are really looking at the whole. . So in biologic dentists, we're gonna use mercury safe protocols. You might see things saying mercury free dentist, um, which may mean that that dentist does not place.
[00:02:53] Those silver mercury amalgam fillings. Um, but having a mercury safe protocol means that that dentist has been certified, taken extra education to know how to remove it safely. So those mercury vapors aren't being, um, exposed into the air and we're breathing that in and the patient is breathing it in. , we had take more of an individualized approach to material selection.
[00:03:15] A lot of people who come and seek biologic dentists may have, um, sensitivities to foods, to chemicals. Um, and so we really look at that person specifically, make sure we choose, uh, the right materials. We're gonna look for things called cavitation and infected group. Canaled teeth cavitation is when an extracted tooth leaves behind a hole, it doesn't fill in properly, and that's a wonderful little breeding ground for, uh, microbes, bacteria, viruses, parasites, lime.
[00:03:46] Um, so it's really important that we identify those and make sure they are, uh, resolved if they are causing some systemic issues. We also use therapies like cranio, sacral, osteopathic, neural. Other body work to address the tempera mandibular joint disorders. You know, a lot of times the bite may be off, but there is, maybe there's a tongue tie, something that all the fascia is being pulled in different directions.
[00:04:12] We need to address that. Um, in order to get really well, it's not as simple as just providing you with a splint, um, which is actually acting more like a. . So another definition is diagnosis and treatment of dental and intraoral conditions and associated structures, right? So the head, the neck based on scientific knowledge of energy, muscle testing, electromagnetics, sound, light, acupuncture, homeopathy, and nutrition.
[00:04:41] We educate and we implement detoxification strategies also. So there's a lot more to the the diagnosis and treatment if you're in a biologic dental office. . So what are our primary goals? We want to not just drill and fill the teeth. We want to identify the root cause of the symptom or disease. Why is that tooth cracked?
[00:05:03] You know, why are you having pain in there? Why do you have gum disease? Or why do you have gingivitis? You know, and in my, I opinion, most all diseases, I don't care what you call it, come down to infections and or to. At the cellular level, it's these toxins, whether it's from a bacteria, a pesticide, something, you know, in the food that they are going to affect at a cellular level.
[00:05:29] Our ability to make energy and they interrupt the way that our immune system functions. So instead of just trying to kill the bad bacteria or you know, take out that the cav. In the tooth. What the goal is, is to provide an environment in the mouth and the body that's gonna facilitate the removal of toxins and infections and enhance the body's natural ability to heal.
[00:05:55] So much of medicine and dentistry today is based on pharmaceuticals. It's based on the germ theory, which is that it, you know, that one bug is causing all the problems, but we really have to. What is allowing that bug to grow and proliferate? Um, and a lot of times it's the toxins which creates acidity in the body, which leads to a kind of a cascade of issues.
[00:06:19] And depending on our susceptibility, our lifestyle, we're gonna manifest disease in different ways. So as a biologic dentist, I'm looking for the root cause and I'm looking to enhance the ideal environment in the mouth so that the bad bugs can't proliferate, the good bugs will be there and provide good health, and then will naturally prevent cavities and gum disease.
[00:06:45] So how is this this different? We've already kind of gone into some details here, but we're gonna use the most biocompatible materials. You know, a lot of things we use in dentist. Um, our plastics, you know, they have quite the smell. There's a lot of toxicity in some of the traditional things we use, so we're going to minimize metals.
[00:07:04] Okay? We know that heavy metals are a major contributed to disease, um, and specifically neurologic disease. If you think about how, um, close right the mouth is to the brain, we really wanna minimize, uh, metals there. We wanna get rid of synthetic additives, preservatives, for example. I use. Uh, uh, anesthetic that has no, uh, preservatives at all.
[00:07:29] We minimize the use of antibiotics and opioids to manage infection and pain. Now, of course, sometimes it's warranted if your face is swollen out to here. We need antibiotics and it's wonderful that we have all of these options available, but we're gonna look more towards homeopathics, um, using something like ozone, an all natural antibiotic anti micro.
[00:07:49] To help get rid of the infection of pain. These kind of modalities enhance our body's ability to heal versus a drug that's going in and, and stopping some kind of reaction, but not really getting at the cause of the pain or infection. We may, uh, many dentists, biologic dentists will use lasers, will use 3D imaging, or you may have heard of cone beam technology, so it's a 3D x-ray.
[00:08:12] It gives us much more detail about what's going in the mouth looking for. Um, I. We use safe amalgam removal techniques, so we'll use rubber dams, special vacuums, all kinds of way to mitigate the release of that vapor into the environment. We're gonna use diagnosis technology, um, like muscle testing. This is a, a really excellent way to individualized treatment by looking at how the body interacts with things in our environment.
[00:08:41] Each one of us is very, very different and I learned this technique. I knew patients needed certain supplementation, for example, maybe vitamin D or magnesium, but because there's so many products out there, how do you know what's the best for that patient? So muscle testing is a way to individualize, to see what supplement, um, is, is proper for that patient and what the proper dose is.
[00:09:04] We can also use, uh, biofeedback systems. I have a wonderful bio energetic system called Nest Health, which really looks, if I can't understand where the pain or inflammation might be coming from, we can do a whole body scan and that gives me a better idea of what exactly is going on that may be leading to the symptom.
[00:09:23] Uh, we're gonna also look at the whole body. So if you have gum disease, in my opinion, that's an autoimmune condition. So we can, you know, throw mouth washes and stuff at the mouth, but, Why did that environment in the mouth shift and create a, an environment where those so-called bad bugs could proliferate?
[00:09:41] Right? So again, there could be toxins in the digestive system. So we wanna treat the whole digestive system, detox the whole body, and that's a way to create a healthier environment, and that's how you're really gonna cure. The gum disease versus just treating it right. Um, we're going to, uh, give you a lot of education on nutrition.
[00:10:00] This is really, really important. Some of the top nutrition specialists, believe it or not, in the history, have been dentists, which makes sense. This is right where digestion starts, but it's really important that we're getting our fat soluble vitamins and our minerals. They're really deficient in our society today in our food, the soils.
[00:10:19] Are depleted. Um, and there again, there's so many toxins in the environment that we need to really pay attention to, um, the diet or supplementation. And we're also gonna identify systemic issues that may be linked to conditions in the mouth. Like I said, if you have leaky gut or, uh, Crohn's disease or any kind of, uh, I b D ibs, then um, or SIBO even, right?
[00:10:43] A small, um, intestinal bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth, candida issue. These are all going to be affected too. We also think of um, things like certain cancers. We'll talk about how the teeth are all on tooth meridians that are related to other parts of the body and energetically they are related.
[00:11:04] So again, main concept. We talked a little bit about this already, the terrain theory. Microorganisms do not cause. But rather the environment is gonna dictate what organisms thrive. So if there's a lot of toxicity in your diet, even emotional toxins right, can really affect the pH. And if we become, our body becomes very acidic, then the so-called good bugs cannot, cannot survive in that environment.
[00:11:31] But the more pathogenic the bad bugs, they do thrive in a more acidic. So what can we do to reverse that acidity? And again, a lot of that has to do with our diet and our lifestyle, create that more balance. Um, because pH often will pull all of our minerals trying to balance our blood. Our blood needs to maintain a very specific, um, narrow range of pH.
[00:11:54] And so we're gonna sacrifice our teeth and our bones in order to maintain that, that pH level, so that. Gum recession, it creates bone moss. Um, and again, it creates those more pathogenic bugs to take over. We know too, you know, genetics patients will come to me and say, oh, well my mother, my father, they all had bad teeth.
[00:12:15] That just runs them. We have soft teeth. Well genetics we know now play a very small part in our actual overall. What is more important, and we call epigenetics, is our lifestyle. You know, what is our food? What's our diet? How's our sleep pattern? How's our stress? How do we manage those kind of things.
[00:12:34] Those will either turn on or turn off the good or bad genes. So really, really important that we again, holistically think about uh, our, our. We know that toxicity will lead to deficiency, which I was just saying, right? We were gonna pull all those minerals, causes ple, amorphism, which is literally a changing in the type of bacteria or other microbes, and will lead to the overgrowth of the so-called bad ones.
[00:13:02] So again, another slide. The germ theory. This is what, um, most modern medicine is based on, right? Pastor decided, , um, kind of coined this theory that we said all disease arrives from micro organs, so you have to ingest something bad in order to get disease, right? And so, so then out of the germ theory came antibiotics.
[00:13:25] Well, if it's a bug, let's create a drug that's gonna kill that bug, and then everything will be better. Now obviously antibiotics are super important and they've. Um, so much health and are absolutely necessary, but we have to really think about that and be careful because we know antibiotic resistance is a major deal and so seemingly easily cured.
[00:13:46] Um, diseases now are being harder to treat because we've overused the antibiotic. So in that cellular theory, his, um, colleague Bamp, um, said, you know, what disease really is coming from within the body? It's when the function of the organism changes that the ho horse host organism, uh, is not able to function as well.
[00:14:11] So every disease associated with a particular, um, condition. So disease comes from an unhealthy. , and you can think about this one. Um, say, you know, you get a cold, right? Or you get the flu, but your spouse who you sleep to e every single next to every single night doesn't get it. Well, if it's all about the bug and you're, you know, sharing all sorts of germs, why doesn't that other person get, uh, the bug, right?
[00:14:38] What's, because their body, their immune system may be stronger. It's able to, um, take that bug and get rid of it. So again, that's more, um, evident. That it's about the body. The people who got very, very sick from Covid were the ones who had lots of inflammation and a lot of other diseases, their bodies are weaker, not able to handle another assault on there.
[00:15:00] So again, we gotta think about that the, the terrain and how we create health within our body. We know if we take vitamin C and vitamin D and zinc, we're going to be more resistant to. And that is because of the terrain. The healthier the body is, the more able, you're able to resist, um, any other disease or toxin that comes along.
[00:15:22] So we think of teeth as circuit breakers, okay? In everything in this world is made of energy. And there's a doctoral in Texas, the name is Dr. Jerry. Um, he became very, very sick and got better by understanding the cellular. . So he states every single tooth is on a specific meridian. In Chinese medicine there are 13 meridians.
[00:15:45] Each tooth is connected onto that. He also did an interesting study with an oncologist found that 90% of cancer patients had an infected tooth on that same meridian as the cancer. So it's not to say the infected tooth or root canal tooth is causing the cancer, but if the tooth is a circuit breaker and the tooth.
[00:16:05] then there's less energy running through that whole circuit. And the way I describe that to my patients is imagine your immune system as a hundred soldiers if 60 of them. So he believes that a root canal or a dead tooth will decrease the voltage on that circuit by 60%. So if 60 of your immune system soldiers are up there trying to deal with the chronic infection and inflammation in the tooth, you only have 40 soldiers left for the entire rest of the body that's on that meridian.
[00:16:34] You know, we make cancer cells every single day, but most of the time our immune system is strong enough. It's able to recognize them and get rid of them. But if we don't have enough soldiers to recognize and get rid of them, that's how this, this inflammation and chronic disease and cancers can arrive.
[00:16:49] We need to have enough energy in our body to be able to detect and destroy things that, um, create bad. . So here's a wonderful chart. You can find this, um, just Google tooth meridian chart. And I love this one because it's, you know, shows a picture. So something I see all the time is an upper molar and breast cancer.
[00:17:11] Okay? So if an upper molar has infected, I've seen this in my own practice alone five different times, um, related per woman with breast cancer has had a root canal or an infected tooth on an upper molar. Okay? So a lot of times, again, when I can't really understand what's going. I of a tooth that's seeming to be bothersome to a patient, but there's no obvious decay or crack or anything.
[00:17:35] You know, I, I pull out this chart and I look, are you having any digestive issues, right, a lower first mole, or it's painful, you know, maybe that person has IBS or Crohn's or, you know, they had food poisoning. So it's really interesting to make this connection because sometimes it's actually happening in a distal.
[00:17:54] But you're feeling it. The referred pain is in the tooth. So sometimes this can lead to unnecessary root canals, unnecessary extractions, because we're not really understanding that that source of the pain. So what about heavy metals? We know that heavy metals cause toxicity just in 20, 22 years ago now, the FDA actually did recommend that we reduce the use of these dental amalgam fillings.
[00:18:23] It's important on Shin amalgam is 45 to 55% mercury. All right. I just had a patient yesterday who said what? I had no idea. Well, of course, because we call them silver fillings, if we call them mercury fillings, uh, they would not be as popular. They wouldn't have been used as often. Um, so there's also silver, copper tin.
[00:18:43] Now, some people have had amalgams in their mouth decades and really don't have problems. Their immune systems are great. They have the good terrain within their body, but some of us, especially now with the toxins, we have more than 80,000 chemicals in our environment today. Children are being born with 200 plus chemicals in their body before they even take their first breath.
[00:19:04] So it's more problematic. Our buckets are filling a lot faster these days, and this is why these metals and these other PEs tic. It's more important to recognize them and try to remove them, cuz there are some toxins we can't help but to avoid. You know, it's in the water, in the air. So anything that we can do to mitigate those toxins, to remove them.
[00:19:27] Think about our cosmetics, things that we put on our body and on our skin. Those are things that we can, we can look for alternatives, more natural things so we're not constantly adding to that bucket. And once that bucket gets, Spills over, which becomes disease. So we want to diminish that full bucket, um, and help restore that healthy terrain of the.
[00:19:48] So in 2020, um, they went, didn't go quite far enough to say nobody should have amalgam, but they did say no pregnant women, no women who are planning to get pregnant. Nursing women, no children younger than six. Okay. Because we know, uh, mercury has an impact on our mental state and our ability to learn.
[00:20:06] Okay? Nobody with any neurologic disease compared kidney. Or any obviously sensitivity to, to Mercury or any of the other metals that are involved. You know, in my opinion, nobody should have these metals. We have wonderful alternatives, so there's no reason, um, to use this and the people who are still using, it's because it's, it's cheap.
[00:20:26] But that is not an excuse to, um, defend our, our overall health. In 2005, the World's Health Organization said that Mercury may have no threshold for which some adverse effects do not. So this was 2005, but it's also very, very important. As I said, the individual response to Mercury varies. So when we are looking at a person and deciding treatment, again, we need to consider their body and their health.
[00:20:55] Other, um, things that we, we really look at that, um, We know that every tooth is an organ. We kind of think it, think of it as just this functional thing to help us chew our food. But every tooth has its own blood supply, nerve supply, lymph supply. Um, anybody who's ever had a toothing, you know that there is a nerve in that tooth.
[00:21:15] And when we have an infection, those will drain. They will drain right to the vagus nerve. That is the 10th cranial nerve responsible for, uh, all digestive function. It innovates every single organ in the, uh, digestive. . So if you have an infection in the vagus, it's gonna shut down your digestion. If you're not able to digest well, you are going to create tons of inflammation in your body, which leads to the acidity, which leads to leaching of minerals from the teeth and the bones among other detrimental issues.
[00:21:47] So very, very important, uh, that vagus nerve, um, to keep that healthy vagus nerve is, is part of our parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for our. Digest repair. Ideally we should be spending 80% of our time in that form of nervous system. But again, in modern life, usually the reversed, where we're about 80% in the sympathetic go, go, go, go, anxiety, um, you know, we're running away from the tiger.
[00:22:13] And, and it can be just emotional things that put us in that state as well. Not just, you know, physical stress. So again, really, really important. If we can remove anything that's affecting the. Um, then we're going to improve our digestion, which will improve our immune system. Fluoride, this is another really big one that biologic dentists, we are not proponents of fluoride.
[00:22:37] Fluoride is not a natural component of teeth, okay? It was brought in after the wars as an industrial byproduct. What are we gonna do with all this excess, um, started being put in the water being made all sorts of toothpaste and mouth rinses and such. The way fluoride works is it poisons the bacteria. Um, so if it's poisoning the bacteria, you can imagine, well, what is it doing to the.
[00:23:03] So topically it can be effective in helping, uh, reduce cavities, but there are other better ways without adding that toxin. There are over 66 studies which link fluoride to lowered IQ in children. Fluoride is also competes with iodine to make good thyroid hormone. So many of us have thyroid issues and it's also because of the bromide that we see in a lot of flour too.
[00:23:27] We need to have healthy iodine. If you're ingesting a lot of um, that's gonna be problematic. Okay. It is a, a neurotoxin. So, and, and we've seen a lot of times in kids when they were overdoing it with the fluoride, they will develop white spots or real severe cases, brown spots, um, that we call fluorosis.
[00:23:47] These are hypo calcified areas and they, the teeth are actually weaker and, and, and it also doesn't look very nice, but they, you cannot bond to those areas very well either. Um, better to have the proper minerals, the proper vitamins, um, good, healthy lifestyle. That's what's gonna keep, um, cavities out of the mouth.
[00:24:11] Root canal, teeth, root canal, as we said, every tooth is an organ, so root canal, tooth is a dead organ. Anything dead in the body is going to attract pathogenic bad organisms to that area. And the problem. When a tooth has been root canal, there's no more feeling. So you may be harboring all this bacteria, but you feel absolutely nothing.
[00:24:33] So most dentists and patients have no idea that something could, uh, be going on here. But think about it as, uh, your appendix. When that gets inflamed, we don't cut you open, flush it out, put some rubber in there and close it back up. No, that would be ridiculous, right? It's a dead organ. We cut it. root canals are wonderful because we're able to maintain our teeth and, and nobody wants to lose their teeth.
[00:24:57] So, um, however, it's important to understand, you know, this is where informed consent really comes in, that there is a potential, um, for this to impact our immune system. But again, every single person is different. If a young teenager comes in and they knock their tooth, you know, and they, they need a root.
[00:25:15] They should have a root canal, maintain that tooth, let them finish growing. And then down the line, are there any systemic issues that we may need to think about that root canal. So not every root canal needs to be pulled out of the mouth. We have to consider that patient's individual health. Okay. Um, there's a lot of studies showing Dr.
[00:25:38] Weston Price was a dentist in the thirties. Um, his own son had died of a root canal, so he became really interested in how this affected the rest of the body. He took infected teeth from, uh, a heart attack victim and embedded it in the skin of rabbits. All of the rabbits developed that same condition. Um, he also experimented with dick's different kind of chemicals to try to sterilize.
[00:26:01] And almost a hundred percent still were culturing for bacteria. A tooth. Even though there's a, um, a main canal of the nerve, there are thousands of little side canals basically, which it's almost impossible to completely, um, remove all types of bacteria, toxins from, from teeth. again. Dr. Huggins and Dr.
[00:26:23] Haley, they prove that a hundred percent of root canal teeth are infected on toxin and toxic. Um, they had 5,000 consecutively extracted root canal teeth, um, took them to the lab and they showed, um, toxins. Um, most biologic dentists or some biologic dentist, they can take out a tooth, we can send it to a lab and we can see what kind of bacteria and every single one that you send will show para.
[00:26:49] Bacteria, viruses, um, you, you name it. Lyme is very common to find in the, in the teeth too. Okay. 2013, there were researchers in Finland, they just, they analyzed blood clots and found DNA that are typical in root canal and, and gum disease, uh, pathogens. So again, really, really, uh, important that that link, that bacterial link, that infection link, which causes.
[00:27:15] And that's been pretty well established in the dental community. We know, um, with heart problems, we really wanna make sure that mouth is very clean. cavitation, we mentioned that earlier. It's also called fatty degenerated osteolysis of the jawbone. Okay. Um, and again, these sites, these, these extraction sites, they may not fill in with bone properly.
[00:27:39] And so another place, because there's no blood supply, the immune system doesn't know what's going. But the byproducts of these microorganisms are leaking through the limb system down into the vagus and can create a lot of problems. So this infection, as you're swallowing these kind of things every day, um, we can cause leaky gut maybe one of the problems.
[00:28:01] Um, there's also inflammatory cytokines called ranes, which is implicated cancer, arthritis, atopic dermatitis, nephritis, colitis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's. So, Cytokine has been found in these cavitation sites in root canal teeth. So again, really, really important that we recognize. Look for the source of the symptoms.
[00:28:26] So here's just a nice slide showing, um, a regular x-ray, everything looks fine there. You would never think anything of it. Um, but when you take it out, you can see it's just this fibrous tissue never filled in properly. What about the. So many people come in, oh, I have tmj. A lot of times it can be due to braces, right?
[00:28:47] We often make the teeth look pretty, but we kind of ignore the tongue and the cheeks and, and the way everything, um, is supposed to sh function together. So oftentimes the bite is not balanced, and our body is really smart and it tries to adapt to the certain conditions. Most of us, our lower jaws are too far back.
[00:29:07] It wants to be more. So constantly being back and then chewing can lead to, uh, a lot of issues in the joint space. Um, and the muscles stress. Obviously a lot of us tend to hold stress in our jaws and our upper upper body. And that can also, um, when the teeth don't come together just quite right, we can get skeletal mile mal a.
[00:29:30] Also important to look at the tongue. Is there a tongue tie underneath the tongue that is preventing that tongue from resting all the way on the roof of the mouth? It's the tongue, which is the strongest muscle in the body, which is supposed to create a nice wide shallow P that allows the the upper jaw to move forward, and then the lower jaw will be able to move to its proper comfortable.
[00:29:52] So a tongue tie can cause muscle fatigue and tension all the way down to the back. The tongue is connected all the way to the large toe. So we need to, again, be aware of this and having different, um, modalities like, uh, cranial sacral, myofascial therapy, all these things to release tight fascia, making sure that bite is comfortable and even so that we're not affecting the muscles all the way down the rest of the body airways very, very important.
[00:30:20] We're seeing this almost every child I. Has a narrowed airway and a lot of times it doesn't affect them as a child. But then we hit middle age, the collagen starts to collapse a little bit. We develop snoring, sleep apnea. So it's really important that we recognize, um, this is airway problem. If we're not getting enough air, uh, we may be grinding.
[00:30:41] We'll, if you notice that your teeth, the front teeth are starting to wear and become flattened, it's because while you're sleeping, you may be jutting forward. Causing that grinding constantly and you're not aware of it cuz you're asleep. Um, but your brain while you're sleeping, needs more oxygen. So if we're not getting enough oxygen, we're more susceptible to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, again, more of these systemic issues.
[00:31:04] So proper airway, proper breathing, proper nasal breathing is also very, very important. We need to think about that. Grinding again, if the teeth aren't aligned, but it also could be parasites or some studies that really reveal parasites causing stress on the. Will also cause a little bit of grinding.
[00:31:24] Other big thing that we really wanna re remember is the mental emotional component. All of us have dealt with stress. Again, our whole environment is very stressful. Um, if you look on the tooth meridian chart, you'll find some, um, very detailed ones also connect emotions to different part of the. For example, the liver, um, is related to anger and resentment, and that's related to the canines, those pointy teeth in our mouth.
[00:31:51] The lungs are related to grief, which is associated with molars and premolars. So we can have these, these emotions that sit within different organs in our body that can also, um, affect teeth. I have a couple of patients, you know, acid reflux patients, um, that were related. Stress and other problems going on in their life when they were feeling more calm and relaxed.
[00:32:16] You know, there was no tooth pain, but if they'd go into the same stress sa, then the tooth pain would come back. So it was, it was very interesting and a really important, again, in the holistic light, we need to consider our emotions too. I think in, in my opinion, it's one of the major. In disease. So we can go in there physically, try to treat things, but if we are not recognizing the impact of our thoughts and our emotions, um, that we're never gonna get a hundred percent.
[00:32:44] Well, nutrition so important. We talked about the fat soluble vitamins, which are vitamin D, E, A, and K and minerals. So in this little photo you can see, uh, we have vitamin E and vitamin D, which create this matrix. Gla. We also have osteo calcium. and we need vitamin K two to activate that GLA and activate the osteocalcin so that we put the calcium into the teeth and bones and remove the calcium from the soft tissues.
[00:33:15] So if you're a person who develops a lot of tartar on the back of the front teeth, very, very common. Um, there is a deficiency in minerals here, right? And, and vitamins. So often we have patients make sure they're getting enough of the vitamin D three k2, getting enough magnes. Magnesium is something that helps keep colle calcium in solution.
[00:33:34] Um, so again, very important, no vitamin and mineral works by themselves. They all have to work together. So if you're just taking a vitamin D. With calcium, you're missing the boat. And um, we know studies have proven that that just causes more calcium to get deposited in soft tissue. So we need to have the vitamin A, we need to have the vitamin K, we need to have the magnesium all working together to create health and harmony.
[00:34:01] Western Price. I mentioned him again, he traveled the world again trying to understand where this dental disease was coming from. And he noticed, so he was in Papua New Guinea, in Africa, in Australia, all these disparate, um, peoples. But what he found was that the, the, um, people who. No decay had perfectly wide, beautiful jaws had 10 times the amount of those fat soluble vitamins and four times the amount of minerals.
[00:34:31] So even though their diets were different, the key component was those fat soluble vitamins and, and the minerals. So if you wanna prevent decay, We're not gonna give you fluoride. We wanna give you the vitamins and minerals that keep that body healthy. Vitamin K is actually very crucial in, uh, it's an antioxidant.
[00:34:49] It prevents inflammation. Inflammation and free radicals. It may have heard that term cause the parotid hormone to reverse the fluid flow in tooth teeth. So when we have a lot of inflammation, instead of that blood and all those nutrients coming up from circulation and depositing into the. They will actually pull and leach those minerals out of the teeth into circulation to try to neutralize our acidic pH caused from inflammation.
[00:35:17] So again, that balance of the vitamin minerals is much more important than fluoride receding gums. I mentioned this briefly in the beginning. Again, if we don't have enough stomach acid and we're not digesting our food properly, these larger proteins uh, become inflammatory and our immune system sees them as foreign and can attack them.
[00:35:36] That's really the basis of auto. I. So we were often taught down the school, oh, it's brushing too hard or the bite's off. But again, if we have systemic inflammation, we may leach the minerals, which causes a little bit of receding gums. Also can be from the bite not being proper. If you are biting along inclines of teeth instead of right in the valleys or on the peaks, you create pressure, which can also cause, um, some recession there.
[00:36:01] So, again, very individualized. You have to look at that. Do a very good thorough examination and history to really understand what is the root cause. Some of the great biologic treatments that we use, ozone, propane, homeopathics, laser treatments are photobiomodulation, red light and near infrared therapy.
[00:36:24] So ozone, uh, we often think of the ozone layer in the atmosphere and how it's breaking down. And if you breathe ozone, it's so detrimental for us. However, in medical O. It's antibacterial, antifungal, anti parasitic antiviral. It works by stimulating our immune system by oxidation reduction reaction. So as soon as ozone hits the body, which ozone instead of oxygen, which it's oh two, ozone is oh three.
[00:36:50] So an extra oxygen um, atom. And when that hits the body, that third oxygen immediately dissociates and will create, um, products like. Nitric oxide, which is the molecule that allows, uh, dilation of our blood vessels so that our immune systems can, can flood and get to where they need to be. Um, hydrogen peroxide was made in our own body, and that's how we kill certain infections.
[00:37:15] So again, ozone is not directly having an effect. It is stimulating our body to heal ourselves, and that's why there are no contraindications and no side effects. This is something our body inherently makes, and again, it's. Pushing that body is reminding that body how to fight these kind of infections. So it creates excellent, uh, pain relief.
[00:37:37] Uh, we can use it to irrigate, use ozonated water to irrigate the mouth. Um, we can stop cavities, we can treat cold sores with it. So it's really wonderful because it's antiviral, it can help, um, lock those, those virus particles back into. Uh, nervous system so they don't, uh, reoccur ever. It's also known to regenerate cartilage, so when we give this into the TMJ joint, we can actually help rebuild the joint tissue Prolozone therapy.
[00:38:04] This is using propane, which is in a very common anesthetic. Propane causes, again, just like ozone, vasodilation of all of our vessels. And, um, with the sper P we can reach very poorly circulated tissue, which is where we can have a lot of issues. If we are not getting good, good blood flow, uh, we need to have, um, good blood flow for, for health at very, very low-grade toxicity, it will inhibit inflammation.
[00:38:33] It also interestingly, Lytic action. So we talked before about the nervous system, parasympathetic, sympathetic. If you are always in that sympathetic, ramped up nervous system, you're never gonna heal. So propane helps flip that switch, puts us into that resting, repairing nervous system so we can heal and usually it's just a small little injection.
[00:38:55] It's really important Along. Scars can act as interference fields so energy doesn't flow properly. So we use propane in combination with ozone, um, for pain and it's very effective. Other things, we may use some muscle homeopathics, which are all natural anti-inflammatories. A homeopath does not have to be processed by the liver and kidneys.
[00:39:18] So it's much more, um, helpful. It doesn't interact with medications. Um, uh, things like oiled clo. The eugenol within that is very calming to tooth pain. St. John's work, hypericum excellent for nerve pain. And RN is also another, uh, important anti-inflammatory homeopathic that I often. red light and near Infr red light.
[00:39:41] This is an absolutely amazing therapy. It also feels really good, but red light they, it will stimulate the mitochondria in the cells. The mitochondria is where our energy is made. The mitochondria responsible for our immune system, so using this light will penetrate in there and just creates, again, good blood flow and good health and good energy so that we can get into that parasympathetic nervous system and, and heal.
[00:40:09] So some common questions I often get is, how do I whiten my teeth? Is it dangerous? Um, most all whitening are based on peroxide. Um, they all are fine. They do not harm the gums. You have to just follow instructions carefully. But if you really want white teeth, you gotta create it from the the inside. And again, the more minerals that you have in your diet, the whiter your teeth.
[00:40:33] uh, I often get how do we create a cracked tooth? Um, well, it depends on the extent of it. Can we build it up? Can we put a crown on it? Does it have to be, um, extracted? This is why it's really important that we see somebody who's holistically minded so we can understand what's the best long-term solution for that patient and that tooth.
[00:40:51] bad breath. Oftentimes it's coming from the stomach, you know, if the stomach, again, doesn't have enough stomach acid and things are just kind of petrifying inside the stomach, that will cause bad breath. It's not just about having bad bacteria in the mouth, but that's why we want to use oral probiotics.
[00:41:07] Systemic probiotics, again, creates that healthy environment so that we don't get, um, the byproducts of, of, um, the organisms that can lead to bad. A good biologic dentist is gonna prepare you for mercury removal or oral surgery, maybe with some detoxification supplements before and after, so that if you are more sensitive, if you have more issues, you'll be able to handle that much more easily and can, um, decay be prevented or reverse.
[00:41:36] I absolutely think it can be prevented as we talked about nutrition wise and importantly, uh, revers. I've never seen one completely eradicate, but things like ozone and the the good diet can, um, stop it from progressing. So that's something I'm working on and hopefully in my lifetime we'll figure out how to completely, uh, reverse the decay and the softened, uh, tissue underneath.
[00:42:01] And, um, we'll look forward to that. Now lastly, um, how do you find the right dentist? All biologic dentists are different. They may have different, um, amount of education, expertise and knowledge. So things that we can ask them is, how did you become that? Um, how do you restore decayed teeth? Uh, do you re recommend certain mouth washes?
[00:42:23] Do you counsel about nutrition? How do you remove these patients? What is, what is your rationale for doing root canal? What are the precautions that. Do you use fluoride? How do you determine a material is compatible and what will happen if you don't do this procedure? So that's really important, especially with informed consent.
[00:42:43] Okay, so you have a root canal. We suspect it may be infected and causing, um, a problematically, but ultimately is up to the patient to decide, you know, we can provide the education. Um, but it's important to know, um, have that conversation. Well, what if I do nothing? Because that is also an option and really important to underst.
[00:43:03] So again, in summary, biologic dentists seek to find the root cause of disease and symptoms providing long-lasting relief and treatment. And not all biologic dentists are created equal. So do your homework, ask the right questions, um, and hopefully we will, um, make good progress and be able to heal you from whatever ails you.
[00:43:24] Thank you so much and join me next time as we interview more experts on that oral systemic connection.