Looking Beyond The Tooth: Why Treating The Whole Person Beats Chasing Symptoms

What if the loudest clue in your health story is your breath at night? We unpack how airway function quietly shapes sleep, mood, attention, growth, and long-term wellness—and why treating a symptom in isolation often misses the bigger truth. With Dr. Mark A. Cruz, we connect evidence-based practice to a systems lens that respects the whole person and not just the part that hurts.

We start by challenging the limits of a reductionist approach: randomized trials are essential, but life is messier than a controlled question. From there, we map the real-world cost of siloed care—dentistry over here, ENT over there, pediatrics somewhere else—while patients carry the puzzle pieces. Then we step into human systems medicine, a model that sees one body and many signals. Using clear, everyday examples, we show how snoring, mouth breathing, and nasal obstruction can steal deep sleep and present the next day as irritability, brain fog, or ADHD-like behavior. Instead of medicating the daytime, we fix the nighttime.

Dr. Cruz breaks down three actionable layers for smarter care: molecular (inflammation and biologics), cellular-tissue (healing and adaptation), and structural-organ (joints, palate, airway). The key is sequence. Stabilize nasal breathing and sleep first, then consider structural changes like expansion, myofunctional therapy, or bite adjustments. You’ll hear how seemingly separate issues—bedwetting, recurrent ear infections, jaw pain, crooked teeth—often trace back to the same upstream airway bottleneck. The result is a plan that is more precise, less invasive when possible, and far more durable.

Throughout the conversation, we center what matters most: your experience. Patients are not passive recipients of care—they’re the best source of patterns and context. By integrating the strongest evidence, clinical judgment, and your goals, airway-focused dentistry becomes a gateway to better energy, calmer days, and healthier growth for kids and adults alike. If you’re ready to move beyond “not sick” and aim for true wellness, this is your roadmap.

Subscribe, share this with someone who snores, and leave a review to help others find the show. Got a question about sleep, snoring, or nasal breathing? Send it our way and join the conversation.

To learn more about Dr. Mark A. Cruz, DDS. visit:
https://www.MarkACruzdds.com
Dr. Mark A. Cruz, DDS. 
32241 Crown Valley Pkwy #200  
Dana Point, CA 92629  
949-661-1006 

Transcript

Setting The Airway Agenda

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Airway Focused Dentistry with Dr. Mark A. Cruz, the show where better breathing leads to better living. If your nights sound like a lawnmower course or your energy's stuck on low battery, you're in the right place. Hosted by Dr. Mark A. Cruz, we explore how the airway impacts your sleep, your health, and your smile. So you can breathe, sleep, and be well. Take a deep breath, and let's get started.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Understanding

Why Whole-Patient Thinking Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:33

the whole patient, not just the symptom, can completely change the accuracy of diagnosis, the effectiveness of treatment, and the long-term health outcome. Welcome back, everyone. I'm Julie Schwenzer in the studio with Dr. Mark A. Cruz. Dr. Cruz, it's always great to talk to you about these topics.

SPEAKER_02 0:51

Thank you. Thanks for giving me the opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

So, Dr. Cruz, we're exploring something that you've touched on quite a bit in past podcast episodes, and that's the big picture topic and why it's so important for medical providers to look at the patients as a whole rather than just the symptom they came in for or the condition. Will you please expand on that?

SPEAKER_02 1:15

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it really kind of boils down to the way uh in the West, uh, we've been all trained, whether in dentistry or medicine, less so if you're in allied uh disciplines, but um focusing on dentistry and medicine, we were all brought up in this allopathic versus homeopathic and allopathic uh model where it tends to be the symptom that we're managing or you know, whatever, you know, condition or versus trauma. I mean, it's like you're solving that chief complaint, the patient chief complaint. And uh, and and so about 19, about the late 90s, early 2000s, there was a big movement called

Evidence-Based Care And Its Limits

SPEAKER_02 2:06

evidence-based um decision making that was uh started by um uh uh by a physician um in Canada that basically had a call to arms to say, look, you know, we need to practice both a science-based, evidence-based approach, and there are three things to that, or three components to that. One is using the best evidence, um, using your clinical expertise, and incorporating the patient preferences. So all three of those is what makes this an evidence-based approach. And when we're looking at evidence, everyone knows now that the gold standard is what's called the randomized control blinded study. And what that means is that you're in general just taking a question that you're asking. So for example, uh anti-arrhythmic cardiovascular uh drug or heart drug A in comparison to the same uh newer version that's uh B, drug B, and you do a study and you control all the confounding factors. So you can really see if it's drug A is better than drug B, and you're accounting for every factor like age, education, BMI, gender, all those types of things to really control the study. And the better that you do that, the more accurate the conclusion would be in saying that this study actually, the evidence that comes out says that drug A truly is better than B, or vice versa, right? So so that um uh is driven by uh a very what's called reductionist. You're reducing everything down to that question to have um no factors that might make the conclusion incorrect. So that's just the nature of the evidence-based approach in healthcare that now we've been practicing.

Silos, Specialization, And Missed Links

SPEAKER_02 4:18

The problem with that is that it's really fostered an environment of highly specialized um health care where we're getting more, learning more and more about less and less, highly, highly specialized. And that's what we call a silo. And it's very difficult to integrate that care from one specialty to the next, where you know, the cardiovascular surgeon's not going to be talking to the nephrologist or to the uh gastroneurologist or you know, the neurologist, because everyone's really very busy in their silos. And it takes time to actually, even if you have an EMR and EHR, it's an electron health record that you can kind of copy. You know, you're you're trying to distill everything down in a report and seeing what's really going on with this patient. So I think it it allows for addressing uh a symptom, but rarely does it address the overall global problem, right? So that's what the primary care physician, maybe as a quarterback, whether it's the internalist or just uh the general physician, would really have the responsibility of putting it all together. But if if they see condition that they think really needs specialty care, they'll refer. And maybe they get the labs back or the consultation notes back, and maybe it gives them some kind of context because the more specialized, the fees go up. So you're trying to control costs. But it's a system that's really at the end of the day, um, has led to us to a lot of advances. On the one hand, a lot of advances, a wonderful uh um advances. But on the other, overall, our population is getting sicker. Why?

Systems Medicine: The Bigger Picture

SPEAKER_02 6:11

We're getting, there's no question about we are sicker now. Maybe we're living longer, but there's more chronic disease than it was 50 years ago. So I look at that system and say it's a system overall that's fit. It's got a lot of pluses, but a lot of minus. And patients are learning more about that and trying to get more control. So the big movement in Europe that's also started to influence the United States is what we'll call human systems theory or bioregulatory systems medicine. And basically, if I were to summarize, it would be saying one plus one equals three, meaning that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The human being is greater than all its organs or target organs being put together. There's a lot of interaction there that we're not really addressing. And so um, that's the way I practice. Um, it just makes more sense because the old FL thing goes is the hook bones connected to the ankle bone that's connected. We got, you know, everything's interconnected. If you ignore that, then I think you might not be so accurate. You might not be able to go much beyond that symptom. And the symptom typically is the body's way of saying something's not right. And and and it may what's not right maybe beyond the local problem that you have. It may be more systemic. So um, I'll just end by saying that we know that the body, um, in this approach, we're looking at three levels or a hierarchy of uh interactions. One's a molecular traction. That's how the pharmaceutical medication will work at the molecular level, like a biologic. You've got the tissue level, which is uh tissue and cellular level, we're kind of pulling back out now, not what's happening in the cell, but what's happening in this collection of cells, call it organ,

Three Levels: Molecular To Tissue

SPEAKER_02 8:18

um, and um uh uh looking at the uh the tissue level. So yeah, molecular, cellular, and tissue level, three three different areas. So if you're a surgeon, by and large, you're looking at the tissue level. I'm gonna fix this ruptured appendix. But there may be things that are going on that are inflammatory that are happening at the molecular level, uh, as an example. But you know, that's somebody else's job. You know, we'll have the internists deal with uh with that. Maybe it's not that good of an example, but the point is that if you're just used to dealing with structure, if you're a dentist that's looking at a narrow palate and you just fix the palate, that's at the organ level, if you will, not really recognizing what that means at the molecular or cellular level. And so I think just this milieu of information that I just described could be summarized to say that we have a current system that's disease management, versus a wellness model that really is looking more globally at the individual and trying to get to root cause. Because I'll make I'll end by saying I make the distinction between not being sick and being well. And our allopathic training is sophisticated, but it's really designed more to deal with sickness versus fostering wellness.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Okay. And

Airway Clues Behind Common Symptoms

SPEAKER_01 9:55

thank you so much for that explaining everything, Dr. Cruz. And quickly, could you share an example where you've actually unveiled a misdiagnosis or where a patient came in complaining about something and it actually had to do with um possibly airway health or something else, and you you found out?

SPEAKER_02 10:13

Oh, well, there's a long list. So you can have bad wedding, uh, recurrent irritates in children, uh conductive hearing loss, uh, ADD ADHD, anxiety, depression, irritable bowel syndrome. These are all symptoms that are related to the body trying to compensate, um, narrow palates, crooked teeth, type of baby or joint problems, those problems in isolation, not really realizing what the underlying problem is, really a neuro, you know, a problem that's affecting, let's say, the child's uh brain development. Those studies now are very um ADD, ADHD, more often than not, um the evidence would suggest is a missed idea. A kid that's hyperactive, maybe perfectly normal, and they can't focus because they're not getting good restorative sleep. Why are they not getting good restorative sleep? They can't read through their nose. It could be as simple as that. So with a human systems uh approach, I'm really looking more at those things. Okay, I'm gonna get into the questions having to do with you know, those risk factors that may lead to maybe addressing the facial

Upstream First: Sleep And Brain Health

SPEAKER_02 11:31

skeleton at some level where it's called expansion or the teeth, but the joints. But I'm not gonna go first to those structures without looking upstream to the problem that's really a bigger problem. It's brain development, loss of IQ, um, depression um are potentially bigger problems than having the teeth crooked, you know, in my opinion. Again, that's wellness versus just fixing uh, you know, a perceived problem that might be cosmetic.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

So well, Dr. Cruz, thank you for explaining that so clearly because it really sheds light on the you know the concept of why the whole patient thinking is essential for modern health care.

unknown 12:14

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I and and one last thing, I'll just say the other part of this is it really engenders better patient communication because you really the most important member of the healthcare team is the patient. I mean, they they getting their input versus, you know, the guy in the white coat that says this is just the way it is. So uh I think people are know more about their body than in an healthcare provider, oftentimes. They may not understand it maybe and uh completely, but that's why we've come together as a team to try to figure things out.

SPEAKER_01 12:52

So well, I really appreciate

Partnership With Patients

SPEAKER_01 12:54

what you just said. And Dr. Cruz, thank you again. I'm looking forward to our next episode.

SPEAKER_02 12:59

Sure, absolutely. Thank you, Jill.

Closing And Resources

SPEAKER_00 13:05

That's today's breath of fresh insight from airway focused dentistry with Dr. Mark A. Cruz. Remember, small changes in your airway can spark big changes in your life. Breathe, sleep, and be well. For more information, visit markacruzdds.com or call 949 661 1006. If this helped you, share the episode and maybe give your pillow a quieter night. See you next time.