Transcribed P2: June 2013: Holistic Dentistry & Biocompatible Protocols (Lecture to Gerson Institute)

Now, the other problem we’re having with amalgams is that an amalgam is very hard, and with time, it starts expanding. When it starts expanding, it starts breaking away from the tooth, and it’s so hard that it starts cracking teeth. I don’t know if you can see here. I don’t have the, but can you see the crack line here? Is that easy to see and one here? Yes, after removing the amalgam, you can sometimes see the crack line, and they’re so common.

I probably do about 30 to 40 crowns per month from people that have had cracks. So, I see a lot more amalgam restorations than most dentists because of what I do, and people want to get them out, but still, in all, it’s incredible. Half the amalgams we take out have cracks on the teeth already if they’ve been in there for any period of time.

So, from the physical point-of-view, the engineering point-of-view, this is a material that’s doomed to fail. Hopefully in five to 10 years, we can be sitting here and this lecture will be stored somewhere because amalgam will no longer be used. That’s my hope, and this is before and after. There’s so many ways now to clean up a mouth to get rid of a lot of those restorations, and we have materials that can actually do the job for us and remove all that toxicity and possibility of cracks. A lot of the teeth crack, and we end up having to think do we need to do a root canal now? God forbid, do we need to extract the tooth? What do we do with the cracked tooth? Sometimes we can repair them. Sometimes we put a crown on them. A lot of time we lose the tooth.

If anybody here has amalgams, when you get home, good thing to really revisit the issue and see if you could get cleared of that, both from a physical point-of-view and systemic point-of-view.

Now, this is one of the biggest questions that I get asked all the time. People call my office, what protocol do you follow in the same person that’s been looking at the internet for two weeks and researching, which is a good thing, and there are quite a number of protocols that people follow. International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, I’m a member of that. They have their own protocol. Then, Hal Huggins. He’s really considered the father of modern holistic dentistry. He has his own protocol and many variations of the above.

I suggest if you’re going to ask your dentist what protocol he follows, he may give you an answer that you want to hear. I follow Hal Huggins’s protocol. Oh great, I’m coming, or I follow the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology. Great. So, my suggestion to you is that these protocols are very good guidelines. It’s important, but don’t take your eye off the eight ball. That means that the best of protocols, if it’s not carried out meticulously, is as good as no protocol at all. Again, we’re going to talk about trusting your instincts, trusting who you’re going.

When you find somebody that you can resonate with and you trust, that’s the person that you want to go to versus someone who was recommended to you on the internet or is following such a protocol or another.

For example, one of the most important things in removing amalgams is a rubber dam. A rubber dam, many of you are familiar with, maybe others are not, is just physical barrier. In our office, we set this up, and we actually go in ear and seal it off with a wax so that we have hermetic seal on the area, and you’re not going to be ingesting any of what’s being removed. So, there are a lot of things that dentists must do to remove it safely because you don’t want to remove it like it’s asbestos. You don’t want to remove asbestos unless you have somebody who knows what they’re doing. Otherwise, you’re going to be re-introducing it into the environment, and this is the same thing. You don’t want to re-introduce that into your body.

So, these are some of the basics if you are looking for a dentist that’s going to do this properly. First is you want to prevent the direct intake with a very well-placed rubber dam, meticulously well-placed rubber dam. The other part is preventing gas intake, and that has to do with a good oxygen mask, a good ventilation, a power vacuum. Electric handpiece is one where you can actually lower the rpms and you can actually segment the amalgams so that it’ll come out in pieces rather than to have to grind the whole thing out.

Keep in mind some of these things. This is what you’re really looking for when you’re looking for somebody, or if you want to recommend a dear one in your family who’s looking for the right person to do this for you.

So, in our office, in addition to that, we use homeopathy. We’re very lucky because in our office, we have big windows. We can aerate the whole area often. We do nutritional guidance and quadrant dentistry, which means we take a segment of the mouth. We clean it all at once. We’re not doing one or two teeth at a time.

Well, so now patients are demanding a little bit more healthier alternatives to what we had before, and from the time 30 years ago where people were calling me a quack, pardon the pun here, we’re getting a lot more people following the lead now. So, glad to say that. Glad to report that there’s more and more conscience not just amongst the public, but perhaps because of the public, dentists are beginning to respond.

Let’s shift gears a little bit, and we’ll have a few moments for questions after this, if you’d like. What we’re talking about how we start viewing the human body as sections, as individual sections, and maybe it’s my liver, but nothing functions in a vacuum in the body. Everything is connected, and what have we found about the mouth and physiological connection. Well, a lot of research has shown, particular research has been done on heart disease and how bacterial infections in the mouth actually are affecting the heart.

Now, if you go and do your research, you’re going to find articles that say no link. There’s absolutely no link, and you’re going to find articles that are going to show a definitive link. For me to come and say there’s an absolute link that has been shown scientifically to be the case, not the case. It’s not true. However, they have found that a lot of the bacteria that hide in the gums, and most of you probably know the difference. They’re mostly anaerobic bacteria. Anaerobic bacteria are the kind that doesn’t like aerobics, air. They actually hide in the guys because they’re deadly afraid of oxygen, and that’s actually how they get their colonies to proliferate.

Once you start getting gum disease, and you start getting the space between the gum and the tooth is very important because that’s where the bacteria actually hides itself. Yes, and after we start getting 3 or 4 millimeters of depth in the pockets between the tooth and gum, the bacteria start cheering because, we’re untouched now. They can’t get to me. Right? At 2 or 3 millimeters you can get in with your toothbrush and clean it everyday. Once you get 4, 5 millimeters, it becomes a serious problem because the bacteria are untouched, unharmed, and unexposed to air.

So, this is what we’ve seen the office do, advanced stage. For example, if you see this area right here. If I take a probe, a little instrument, and place it down here. More likely than now, my instrument will go way down here. This is where the bottom of the pocket would be, and we have all this area right here. The toothbrush can probably access that, and all this area down here is no longer accessible and creating a lot of damage.

So, this is what we’re talking about. This is the gum. This would be healthy with very little space here. This is unhealthy when we start having very, very deep pockets here. Now, why am I putting so much emphasis to the pockets in your gums? Because these are the anaerobic organisms that we find inside the gums that we’re also finding in heart disease, same bacteria that we find in a heart that is diseased. Lately, they found the same bacteria in pancreatic cancer. Wow!
Well there’s no studies showing there’s a direct link, but by golly, if I’m finding the same bacteria here that I’m finding here and I’m finding here, well I suspect. I’m concerned. I’m concerned. I would not wait for the definitive research which may take another 20 years for me to know that this is not a good situation, that I don’t want that anaerobic bacteria inside my gums.

So, what do we do? In the past, what we’ve done is basically brushed our teeth, and it’s amazing to me that more dentists do not take the time to teach people how to brush their gums properly. Out of 100 patients that I get, 95 patients have never had any instruction on how to properly brush their gums, not their teeth, their gums.

Part of the traditional hygiene is still very much of great importance. How to
properly brush your gums. I usually instruct my patients to brush their gums just with water and take some time and physically get in there and remove the bacteria from the pockets. Then, they can actually go ahead and put some toothpaste on or whatever they like to use and brush their teeth as a separate activity. I like them to give the gums a lot of attention for the reasons that we’ve already explained, and of course, the dental floss does the job that the toothbrush cannot do.

However, what has happened was that, in my practice, I’ve had people that had come with 5, 6, 7, 8 millimeter pockets. In the past, what did we do with these patients? Well, most dentists would do what we call deep scaling. I’m sure some of you have had it or have heard of people that have had deep scaling. Well, deep scaling is fine and good. It’s a wonderful procedure, but if you’re going to see the dentist once every 6 months and he does the deep scaling for you, what happens between the two appointments? All these bacteria are still growing in there.

The second thing we would tend to do is we would trim those gums back which is called gum surgery. We would cut them back. The gums would get exposed. They’d get very sensitive. It’s probably the lesser of the two evils to have all these bacteria there or to get your gums trimmed back, but it’s not a pleasant thing to have longer roots and sensitivity and all that. I know some of my patients are saying, Doc what else can we do? Can we do something else?