11/13 Lecture: Holistic Dental Health (Transcribed) P4

Then, of course, you want to go to your dentist to make sure that he’s probing. If your dentist is not probing your teeth when you go to see him, I would probably ask him to do that or go to somebody else that will do that for you because this is a critical part of maintaining your health. The other thing is that people don’t realize but crowding on your teeth actually creates a lot of gum pocketing and gum disease. So, that’s something that you might want to consider.

Braces were not for adults for a long time, but nowadays, invisibly braces are great, and about 80% of my braces now go on adults. So, that’s something not just for aesthetics, but if you have a lot of crowding, that’s really promoting gum disease. So, something for you to think about.

A lot of times my patients ask me if the trays that you use for Invisalign or Clear Correct, which is a competitor, if they are BPA-free, and they are. Okay, questions about this segment? Yes?

No, you don’t have to.  You can keep yourself form getting diseased by using the water pick and the ozone.

Most of the bacteria that cause problems in the mouth, decay, periodontal disease, and endodontic problems, most of those bacteria are anaerobes. There’s studies where they should the combination of aerobic and anaerobic bacteria in our mouths.   When there’s disease in the mouth, the anaerobic bacteria take over. So, by actually maintaining the population of anaerobic bacteria in the mouth down, you are keeping disease down. So, yeah, it’s not only when you’re diseased.  Prevention is obviously the best answer.

I understand the crowding of the teeth that you were talking about a few minutes ago.        What about when you have gaps on your teeth?  Does that open up for?

Gaps in your teeth are not problematic unless you have a very small gap in between the teeth where you’re getting food trapped.  If you have large gaps, some people genetically just have large gaps in between their teeth, that’s usually not a problem at all for gum disease, and you’ll know when the dentist probes you. If you have a pocket there, it’s a problem. If you don’t, it isn’t basically.

It’s only when there’s very narrow spaces between the teeth where food is getting trapped and actually impacting the gums that it becomes a problem.  Yes?

Oil pulling is wonderful.  I think it’s a great therapy, and it’s been used for a long time.  I’m very pro it. I, actually, because of the great results I’ve had with ozone, have actually, it’s the treatment of choice in my eyes.

The question was, “How do you feel about oil pulling?”  Does everybody know what oil pulling is? It’s where you put a table spoon of organic oil, oftentimes it’s organic olive oil or organic coconut oil, and you keep it in your mouth.  You swish it vigorously in your mouth for about 10 to 15 minutes.  Some people do it for less, but really get the effect.  It has to be, I believe, for at least 10 minutes.   That’s pulling a lot of toxins out.  Then, you spit it out and make sure you get every last drop of it out of your mouth because you don’t want to swallow any of that back down.  That’s oil pulling.

So, oil pulling is actually quite good, especially if you have metals in your mouth, it is actually beneficial, but really, a lot of the toxins in the mouth are produced by bacteria. So, if you’re really taking care of the bacteria, you’re really taking care of most of the problem.

Now, having said that, I use most of my own home made paste in our office and I encourage my own patients to make their own toothpaste at home.  This toothpaste has a base of virgin coconut oil.  We use that, and then we use that and a few other ingredients, but the base of coconut oil gives you exactly the same kind of effect, especially if you brush or a prolong period of time. It would be like a short mini-oil pulling session.

There’s a question from the live stream, Dr. Vinograd.  It says, “Where do you buy the ozonators?” Now, I assume that means if you already have a water pick and you want to add the ozonator to that.

Right.  They’re actually two separate purchases. One is the water pick, and the second is the ozone machine. I actually put a website where you can actually buy it, but I encourage you to just go on the internet and look for one that has the characteristics that I’ve described.

I was just wondering about hydrogen peroxide.  You said oxygen?

Not nearly as effective as the ozone.  Ozone is O3, quite a bit more concentrated, and it actually kills bacteria a lot of more effectively.  You don’t have to be purchasing hydrogen peroxide for the rest of your life. You just buy your machine once.  I’ve had my ozone generator for about 25 years.

How do you make you own toothpaste?

I actually give the recipe to all my patients when they come in and get their propiece, but I have posted it in our blog. You know, what we’re going to do.

Next week, when we send you the link to the website to go to so that you can watch this for an entire month again, we’re going to include the link to his slide presentation for you and we might actually get his recipe to send to you.

Yeah.  I can actually make it available to send to you guys, and it’s also in my blog.  If you go to drvinograd.com, I have it there. I actually wrote an article about toothpastes, and if you want to see what they’re putting on your toothpaste, it’s like a Halloween story.  It’s kind of scary.

Okay.  So, we’re going to move on, and I’ll take some more questions at the end as well. The root canal controversy.  This is the biggie.  This is the mother of all questions, at least in my practice. I just had a lady contact me from Toronto, and she went to see a naturopathic doctor. She had eight root canals, and they wanted to extract the eight teeth.

So, you know you really have to start thinking.  You really have to start using your head when you’re going to make a decision like this. Our root canal’s a problem.  Do we leave it?  Do we treat it? Do we extract it? What I was talking about before in the internet and getting a lot of information, there are patients that come to me and say, “Doc, I heard root canals are the greatest evil in this world. There’s just nothing worse than a root canal. I want you to take my tooth out.” Ultimately I will if I understand that the patient understands what they’re doing.

If they have all the facts and I can make a decision with him based on intelligent information because I’m not going to be making the decisions for them unless it’s something that I don’t feel comfortable doing that are going to impact their lives.  I think you have to make the decisions that are going to impact your lives by having good information.

So, let’s talk about what a root canal is.  Basically, the pulp, which is a combination of a nerve and some vessels, a vein and an artery, run through the inside of the tooth. Now, when there’s decay and the decay invades the nerve, that nerve becomes diseased.  It becomes infected, and then, we have to decide what we’re going to do with it.

So, let’s go back. So, what do we do?  In the past, people have gone in there. They’ve created a little perforation on the top of the tooth, go in there, remove the pulp, the nerve, and it really is a very painless procedure.  It sounds awful, but it’s really a painless procedure, at least in our office, and then, you actually enlarge the canals a little bit, clean them out, disinfect them. Then, you fill them with material.

Now, in a perfect world, if you could fill them and seal them, you would have a viable situation.  What has given root canals such a bad name is that 99% of all root canals being done today are being filled with gutta purcha which is a rubber with some sealant, like a paste, that hardens, and a few other pieces of rubber. Some of them use heat to melt their rubber.

Some dentists will actually condense it and push it to try to get some kind of mass to fill that area. All of that has been terribly inappropriate and insufficient to really create a proper seal. First of all, the sealers that have been very toxic, and secondly, by both of these methods, you cannot really get a good seal where you don’t have voids.

Now, those little voids, mini-voids that you get by doing a traditional root canal is what creates the problem because when you have those little voids they get invaded by bacteria, anaerobic bacteria, and there’s no way to get them once they get in there.  How do you get them out? So, that has been the problem in the past.

People say you have a dead tooth and a lot of other things. Well, not totally.  It’s a functional tooth.  You still have blood supply from the outside. Do they get more brittle?  Yes. Is that a perfect situation?  No, but you have to understand. How is this going to impact your life?

My advice to this lady from Toronto that called me. I said, “You know, send me your x-rays. I’ll look at them.” I looked at the x-rays.  There was one particular tooth that I felt was really not a good candidate for a root canal.

I said, “Why don’t you extract this tooth, have the dentist put some kind of organic material to maintain the bone quality just in case you want to change your mind later and put something in there so that you don’t lose your bone. Then, go for three months, and get a fill how it is to live without this tooth.”

Then, multiply that times however many teeth they want to take out and see what the quality of your life going to be? What is the quality of your life going to be with a removable denture? Our quality of life impacts our health, too. So, the decision to go black or white sometimes are not the best decisions. We have to really see how immune compromised we are, what the situation is, what the quality of life is going to be post-decision and so forth. So, again, just have good information to make your decisions.

So, options to replace extracted teeth. Let’s say you decide to get rid of the tooth.  We could do an implant, and there a couple of different kinds of implants.  There are implants made of titanium, and recently, from Europe, some dentists have been importing a new technology which they’re doing.  They’re zirconium implants. I don’t do zirconium implants in my practice because I think they still have a lot of challenges. They’re still one piece.  They’re very large.  They’re very invasive. So, I don’t feel that they’re just where we need them to be yet.

You can use a fixed bridge to replace missing tooth. You can use a removable bridge or a Maryland Bridge. Here is an implant.  What is an implant? It’s basically a piece of titanium that’s embedded on your bone, and a crown gets placed.  Is that perfect?  No. Is that something that you have to think about twice before doing?  Of course.

Again, they integrate well into the bone, but it is a metal in your bone. There’s no way around it.  People are going to try to sell you.  “This is the right answer.  This is good.  This is bad.” There’s no good.  There’s no bad.  It’s what’s right for you.