11/13 Lecture: Holistic Dental Health (Transcribed)

We’re going to get to the final portion of our workshop.  I know that Dr. Smith and Caroll talked a little about dental issues as regarding to the Gerson Therapy before, and one of the things that you may have noticed although they didn’t come right out and say that is they don’t seem to have the greatest respect for the vast majority in the dental business because of a lot of things that they have done that have been very harmful to people with the best of intentions, many of them, inadvertently through bad knowledge that’s been passed on for a long time.

So, we’re very fortunate to have one of the good guys here who does not represent the majority of those in his field and who actually does recognize that they mouth is part of the greater human body and not something completely separate from it. So, please welcome Dr. Daniel Vinograd.

Thank you so much. It’s great being here once again. It’s not once again for you.  It’s probably your first time. Where are you guys from?  Can you give me, more or less, an idea?  US? Mostly.  Louisiana?  Wonderful.  Great, great.  Awesome. Well, it never ceases to amaze me how people from all over the globe will come together when they have a certain commonality, and so I’m very, very pleased to be with you guys today.

I’d like to start by talking a little bit about the internet, and why am I starting this talk about the internet? Most of my patients or the first time patients that come to see me have done a tremendous amount of research, mostly on the internet, right? So, the internet is a fantastic tool for us to gain information. However, we gain a lot of really good information from the internet, and we get a lot of really bad information from the internet.

So, we always used to say, “They said this…”, “They said that…” Who is they? In the internet, who is “they”?  Who is writing all this stuff?  Over the years, the people that are actually dominating the internet have gotten quite sophisticated. You have very, very smart people now helping people dominate the internet. So, who’s dominating the internet now? People that are savvy about how to work the internet. So, the information that is apparent on the internet is not always the best. How do we know what is good information and what is bad information?  [That is the key.  Does that mean that we say, “No the internet is evil. I’m never going to go back there again” because it’s got a bunch of lies and information?

Of course not, but it is really important for us to have awareness. Again, the patient’s coming to see doc.    “I read this on the internet,” like it was absolute.   So, we have to backtrack a little bit and say, “Well, where is the information coming from?” How does that fit into your reality?   So, the most important thing that I want to do today, if I’m successful, is I to give you some tools so that you guys can all make sense of what you’re reading, and you can make up your own mind as to what is good information and what is not.

What you don’t know so that you can ask the right questions, that you have the solid knowledge of what it is that you’re going to learn, not only to trust people around you. When you start hearing them talk, you can start separating reality from fiction. You can start separating people who are giving you information  versus people who are trying to sell you something, and most importantly, when can you really trust your own instincts, which is an incredible source for each one of us.

We have an incredible amount of evolutionary intelligence in each of our bodies that we can tap into. So, I would encourage you to tap into that.  Don’t disregard your instincts. Also, start trying to understand who it is that we can trust, and who it is that we can’t. So, I practice what I call biological dentistry, and why do I call it biological dentistry? Because there’s holistic dentistry and amalgam-free dentistry and there are all these terms that have been coined, but bottom line, a dentist will see himself as either a business person,

I know a lot of dentists who are basically just business people. Some of them have large clinics and manage them. I’m not judging anybody.  I’m just basically identifying that they are mostly interested in the business aspect of it.I know a lot of dentists who are incredible engineers.  They’re technicians.They can do a lot of really fine work. There are other dentists who are incredibly caring human beings, and they’re all the combinations above.

In my view, what is a dentist? In my view, a dentist really should be a healer.  Right?   A dentist should be a person that is helping you heal and that is treating you like any other specialist with a certain part of your organism that is actually connected to everything else.

So, for us, and I’ll tell you.  When I came out of dental school, I was treating mouths. I wasn’t treating patients.  I was treating mouths because this is the focus of my training. My training is you have tooth number 18 MOD. This was the lingo.  You have, wait a second. Did we forget that there’s a person behind that?  So, overtime, I have to be honest with you.  When I first started practicing dentistry, it was dissatisfying to me until I finally realized it’s not about a crown. Of course, it is about a crown, but it is not just about a crown. It’s about treating a person, and how is this crown going to affect everything?

So, having said that, I will talk about what is happening with dentistry as a whole. So, from its inception, dentistry has been looking at the repair business of the mouths. So, how do we repair a mouth?  How do we actually take are of broken tooth? That was a big challenge because materials were really not great, and so, the biggest challenge was how do we get something that’s strong enough? I mean, can you imagine the forces that we put on a mouth? Masticational forces.  That’s tremendous. If you’ve ever had a high spot in your mouth between your upper and your lower teeth, you know that can get sore in a hurry because you’re putting incredible amount of pressure in a very, very small area.  You have a lot of muscles.

You have a lot of functional apparatuses that are working towards really grinding the food down. So, it’s very challenging to actually get a material that is going to withstand for many years the masticational forces. So, a lot of the people were really talking about materials that are strong that resist friction, that resist compression.

So, I have a very good friend who was the head of Dental Materials at UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles, and I would always hear him talking about all the research that’s been done about the elasticity of this material, about how this material compares to the expansion and contraction of the tooth, and there was really no regard at all to the physiologic effects of what we’re putting in people’s mouths.

I understand where they’re coming from. They had this huge challenge from an engineering point of view, and they’re just putting their energy and effort into it. Unfortunately, again, we were forgetting we are talking about human beings. Case in point, dental amalgams that a 50% mercury.  I will talk about that a little bit more. They were actually trying to see how they could actually take child’s tooth, and treat it so that they maintain the tooth after the nerve has been infected. The solution?  Formaldehyde.  It’s a form of cresol.  Highly carcinogenic. It’s still being used today, but it actually modifies the nerve. The problems go away.  Obviously, we’re creating a huge amount of new problems when we start using a lot of this.

Root canal sealers were among the most toxic materials as well.  We fail to see the connection between the mouth and the rest of the body isn’t really affected by a lot of materials that we use. Also, by the bacteria that we have in our mouths.  A great deal of information today about how bacteria in the mouth affects the rest of the body.  We’ll talk about that as well.

I will start with mercury amalgams because this is something that I think has been out in the media quite a bit, and it’s really affected a number of us. Anybody ever have amalgams placed in their mouth before? Right.  So, just look around you.  It’s just about everybody, and why were those amalgams placed again? Amalgam is a wonderful material if you’re just looking at a robot where you’re going to put something in physically.

In 1833, there were a couple of French guys that came over to the US and brought amalgam. Then, in 1844, the amalgam was just widely used. In New York, it was used as the restoration of choice. There was a great group of brilliant people, the American Society of Dental Surgeons, that came out, and we’re talking about 1844. We’re not talking about 2010 or 2013. They said, “Wait a minute.  This amalgam is filled with mercury. It’s 50% mercury.” So, they actually were the most prestigious dental group in this era, and they actually said, “If you want to belong to us, the most prestigious organization in the nation, you have to sign a contract that you will not use amalgam.” Brilliant.  Here are our first heroes, right? You could put a cape on them and a big S or whatever you want to put, a big D.

Unfortunately, in 1856, they were disbanded, and the American Dental Association was founded. They were a little bit of an opposition group, which really was proactive in promoting dental amalgam. There was a large group within them that was the American Amalgamists Association that was really driving a lot of this amalgam proposing.

You should know that mercury’s one of the most toxic elements known to humans, and I think most of you know that.   When you think about 50% of the amalgam is mercury, it’s mind boggling, but people that are proponents of amalgam say,  “Yeah, but the amalgam gets fixed.  It gets set with the silver. So, it becomes inactive.” I’m not sure I buy that, and even if I would buy that, I’m not sure I would put it in my mouth or anybody that I care for or any of your guys’ mouth. Just in case, they’re wrong.

Here is from the Department of Health and Human Services. They are actually considering mercury to be the third most toxic material known to man. This is not me.  This is not some kind of a health-oriented healer talking.   This is the government of the United States. So, in the 70s, yeah I go back that far and a little more. In the 70s, I started asking my colleagues, “Guys, this is 50% mercury. Are you concerned at all that your putting this in people’s mouths?”

Most of them were good people, honestly, good people, well-intended people. A lot of them came out wanting to help people out in the healing profession. So, I don’t think there was a lot of mal-intent where they said, “I’m out to poison people,” but a lot of them had a mindset that was different. The mindset then was anybody who’s proposing that amalgam is toxic or shouldn’t be used is a quack, and this is mostly what I got from them when I spoke with them. So, you don’t have to take my word for it. You don’t even have to take the government’s word for it.