Close Me

Downloads

Chapter 1: In the Beginning

My life first began to change in 1982 when my six-year-old daughter developed a skin rash. What started as a small patch on her arm, soon spread to her entire body and, eventually, her face. The patches were dry, red, and itched like crazy. It was not a pretty picture. I knew it needed to be treated before any possible scarring resulted to my daughter’s face. My goal was to take care of the itching and stop the rash from getting worse, while determining the cause.

After consulting physicians, ranging from pediatricians to dermatologists to allergists, my daughter was diagnosed as suffering from eczema. Treatment consisted of prednisone cream. The prednisone did help…but only temporarily. The rash kept returning and spreading. The doctors recommended a stronger strength corticosteroid. If the symptoms had not improved, why would I want to try a higher dose? Then a friend mentioned homeopathy, a method of alternative medicine. At the time, I was unfamiliar with this form of treatment. But I thought it would be worth looking into, as it appeared to be a less harsh means of dealing with this skin disorder. At that time, the Internet was not the mainstay of all information, so I sought referrals from friends and spoke to several holistic practitioners. I finally found a physician who practiced homeopathy in Berkeley, California where I lived.

The homeopathic physician talked to us about things that didn’t seem, at the time, to be related to the rash. But I made every effort to keep an open mind and willingly followed his line of questioning, which lasted for almost an hour.

With homeopathy, the correct remedy must match the descriptions of symptoms; homeopathic medicine also takes into account the condition of the whole person rather than focusing on just one physical symptom. The doctor asked whether my daughter was an introvert or extrovert, whether she had undergone any recent stressful situation in her life, if she had problems sleeping, or felt any feelings of confusion or sadness. Additionally, he asked about her diet and other questions about her as a person. He then disappeared to another room, and soon returned with a white powder that had a botanical or Latin name. He placed it on her tongue, and that was it. We left and in a day or two, the rash was gone and never returned. Magic or medicine? Did the homeopathic remedy cure my daughter, or was it a placebo effect? Scientific validity on homeopathic remedies is still not conclusive. There have been several research studies with people, some studies showing benefits, while others resulting in no more effect than placebo. All I know is it cured my daughter when conventional treatment had failed.

Seven years before this introduction to homeopathy, I had finished my dental education and received my degree from the University of California at San Francisco, School of Dentistry. After the extraordinary experience of my daughter’s healing through homeopathy, I realized there could exist other simple approaches and choices towards healing, as well as perspectives on disease I had yet to learn. I was never taught anything but basic dental training in school. This new experience made me eager to discover more. Could any of it even be incorporated into my dental practice? What I had learned in dental school now seemed to lack connection with the whole person, but focused only on the mouth, and, more specifically, the teeth and gums. Dental education and training gave very little attention on the rest of the body. Dental treatment meant filling, replacing and pulling teeth, along with treatment for the gums, which meant “scaling and root planning” or surgery. That’s it.

Because the focus was strictly on the mouth, I learned nothing about the possibility that poor oral health could affect the overall general health of a person as well as the immune system. There was never a question of offering alternatives for treatment or of educating patients on how to prevent oral disease by becoming partners with their oral physician. I was taught to be a “dental” (which means of, relating to, or for the teeth) technician. I had learned that each and every tooth and the gums had its own blood supply, but nothing was taught about the possibility of this blood supply affecting the heart or any other part of the body if the mouth became diseased. We knew that illness in other organs affected the body in general, but what about the mouth? Studies in recent years have made a connection between poor oral health and many systemic
diseases, which this book will cover. In the 1970s and 1980s this information was not widely known.

I found myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable about treating patients using the traditional approach I had learned in school. I even wondered if I should have followed my three brothers into medical school and become a physician instead of a dentist. Yet, it soon became clear my brothers’ approach towards treatment was not much better. It included the body, and excluded the potential connection of the mouth. My father had been a Professor of Botany who had discovered many medicinal plants on his expeditions; his voluminous books were part of most major university libraries. I began to believe that his field of botany and alternative forms of treatment could be interwoven into oral medicine.

My journey was about to begin. My overriding goal was to gain insight into the interconnectedness of medicine as a whole, incorporating both mind and body, and discovering the effect of both on the mouth. I no longer wanted to be a dental technician with my only objective being to drill and fill teeth. I wanted to learn and educate myself first and then my patients, about the importance of the mouth as the major gateway to the body.

A desire awakened in me to help others towards more non-invasive, simple, safe and effective forms of treatment, the way my daughter had been helped with just one homeopathic remedy. I took every kind of alternative and holistic medical and dental class and seminar available. I learned about the dangers of mercury and other potentially hazardous filling materials that could affect a person’s health. I studied the impact that nutritional deficiencies had on oral health, as well as muscular skeletal problems and the jaw. I discovered herbal, homeopathic and acupuncture approaches for
treatment.

As I began to incorporate and experiment with a variety of these methods, I found some to be totally useless and scientifically untrue, while others were vital. In order for me to use these new forms of treatment in my practice, I required scientific proof so that I could expect the same predictable result through each application. There were some methods that seemed gimmicky, but others had stood the test of time and were reproducible from patient to patient. It also became evident the typical consumer knew little about alternative methods of dental healing. Most consumers were either at the mercy of myths about healing decayed or abscessed teeth magically with an herb, or at the other side of the spectrum of routinely filling and drilling their teeth without questioning their dentist. Both these views seemed very narrow; there was no frame of reference that captured the whole person: the mind, emotions and the entire body, including the mouth. 

Western culture has come a long way with modern medicine, spending multi-millions and even billions of dollars on research for the cure and control of disease, yet we still don’t know the cause or cure of many illnesses. Drugs are made to work for all individuals without considering the emotional, mental or environmental factors that may be involved. For example, does a person’s emotional state of mind play just as important a role in cancer or for that matter, in gum disease, as heredity? What about the dosage of drugs? For children, weight is considered, but does the same dosage work exactly the same for every adult, regardless of other influences? What about diet and stress? Why is it that in the same family, among siblings, one can live to a ripe old age, while another can follow in the footsteps of a parent who died young from heart disease? One child can grow up with perfectly healthy teeth, while in the same family another child loses his or her teeth at an early age. 

One factor medicine does continue to consider, even in oral health, is the state of the “host.” The immune system of the “host” is often spoken of. In the past, the “host” was referred to as the person’s “constitution.” A better way to describe the “host” is to define it as the foundation of the person, including his or her mental, emotional, spiritual, genetic make-up and physical health. The health and strength of this foundation may somehow control our overall resistance or ability to attract disease to our bodies, regardless of whether it involves a tooth or the heart.

The field of “psycho-neuro-immunology” has always fascinated me. It connects our thoughts, mental and emotional processes to biological responses in the body. For a simplified example, picture a lemon. Now cut the lemon and visualize the juice from it dripping into your mouth. With little concentration, your saliva will increase without a lemon being anywhere near you. Similar example can be stress, anxiety and worry. Emotional stresses can be used to demonstrate how these factors can impact our immune function and the health consequences that result with a weakened immune system. Studies show that negative stresses (emotional, psychological) place a burden on our immune system that can directly be associated with aging, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, arthritis, Type II diabetes, certain cancers, fatigue, inflammation and others. All of these conditions have a connection to oral health as well, which will be discussed in this book.

To help my patients relax during dental treatment, I often ask them to visualize being in a far away, beautiful place. This relaxes the whole body and allows me to treat a less stressful patient, and also makes the experience less traumatic for him or her. Studies have shown that recovery after surgery (whether after a tooth extraction or a major procedure) is much quicker, if the patient maintains a positive outlook and expects to recover quickly, without complications. This all has to do with the foundation the patient built on during his or her growth as a child, or consciously developed as an adult.

While in private practice, I became a clinical instructor in the periodontal (gum) department at the University of California, Los Angeles. My patients and students began asking me to recommend products for use as toothpaste and/or mouthwash. This was an area I hadn’t even considered as being important towards oral health. As dentists, we are always given free toothpaste by manufacturers to give away, just as physicians are wined and dined by pharmaceutical reps in order to persuade doctors to recommend certain drugs or to give free samples away. Most dentists are far too busy to do our homework to determine whether these over-the-counter products do what they claim or carry any side effects. By dispensing them to patients, I didn’t realize that I was providing credibility to the products and a form of free advertising and endorsement. When a brand name representative brought me a whole case of free toothpaste to give away, I woke up to the fact that the only way I could truthfully know what to recommend and endorse was to carefully research what was available to consumers.

In 1989 I began to closely examine the dental products sold at retail stores. As I learned more about the contents, I became greatly alarmed as to their ingredients. I looked into the history of toothpaste and noticed it started out as a very simple formula. However, over the years, it became more complex with added “therapeutic” ingredients to prevent cavities and gum disease. Today, even newborns are given fluoride supplements to help prevent cavities. 

Totally disillusioned by what I discovered, I began calling and questioning some of the manufacturers. My calls were ignored. I decided that as a dentist, I needed to think back to the basics. Common sense dictates toothpaste should contain only the best and most beneficial ingredients in order to bring about and maintain prime oral health without harsh, possibly toxic, side effects. I had made a complete 360-degree turn when I began to consider the mind, body, and mouth connection for oral treatment, along with safe, effective home care dental products.

How we look at health and how we treat our bodies today as far as elementary personal care products have strayed far away from basics. We are unaware many of the products we use daily contain “just in case” drugs our bodies do not need, which makes absolutely no sense. For example, tea tree oil is widely used in toothpaste, yet this is an antifungal and should be used in the proper context instead of daily use toothpaste. Instead of formulas to help support the body to maintain health, the focus seems to be a “kill and destroy” mission with antibiotics.

My goals are simple:

• To enable you to become partners with your dental health care practitioner.
• To help you to understand the obvious fact we are unknowingly burdening and possibly even destroying our bodies through everyday use of unnecessary and potentially harmful and questionable ingredients contained in many personal care products.
• To guide you to perceive sickness before an illness affects you. In fact, your body could possibly be the culprit that opens the door to sickness, whether it’s a tooth or the heart.
• To educate you about the many paths available to bring yourself back into wholeness starting with the mouth, without fear of seeking treatment.
• To help bridge the gap for health care practitioners between the mouth and the rest of the body.

This book explains my journey into a simple realization that the mouth is truly the gateway to the body and a microcosm of the rest of the body. The more I became aware of this interconnectedness between all parts of the body, and the more I learned and shared with my own patients, the clearer it became from the feedback I received, that I needed to pass on the information to the public as a whole. This book is for those who want to view health from a completely new perspective of wellness through the exploration of a simple, safe and effective, common sense lifestyle and approach towards a healthy body and healing we’re all born with and is “common” to us all. This is about a wellness revolution starting with the mouth, the gateway to the body.