Click the player below to listen to this episode of Let’s Talk Dentistry or scroll down even further for a transcription of this week’s show with San Diego holistic dentist, Dr. Marvin.
In this episode Holistic Dentist Dr. Marvin is back from a conference he recently attended and is sharing with you the great things he learned that are related directly to providing you with the information you need to make better, more informed decisions regarding your dentistry. The dental industry and dentists in general have become so focussed on reparing teeth, that they have forgotten all about the rest of the body. Isn’t it more important that your overall health be better then just fixing that single tooth; we think so. So with that, lets get going on this week’s episode of Let’s Talk Dentistry!
——– Transcript Of Today’s Show ——–
Good morning, it’s Dr. Marvin. We’re live here at KPRAISE studios 8:30 every Saturday Morning. I’m excited. If you’ve been tuning in to this show the last couple weeks you’ll notice that there have been a couple of replays, because I’ve been out of town getting more education to help benefit you, my patients and provide the best dentistry possible. We are live, this is a live call in show. I’ve got a lot of great stuff to go over today, but if you have a question and you want to call in, you can do that in a few minutes. You’ll want to call this number: 866-KPRAISE. 866-577-2473. The phone lines are open. If you have any questions, please give me a call. We’ve got some interesting topics today, stuff that I haven’t really talked about, and I just want to share it with you. It’s as simple as that. I love my show, I love helping people, I love my listeners, and thanks for tuning in. If this is your first time listening to the show or you’re just fumbling through the radio stations and you’ve come across this show, this is a show that talks about dentistry. It’s called Let’s Talk Dentistry, but it’s really more than just dentistry.
I find it shocking that most people don’t understand that whatever you do in dentistry can effect your health. So dentistry is really the same thing as medicine. Dentistry is just a specialty of medicine, so we look at the body as a whole and the mouth as a part of the whole. This is the reason why we do what’s called holistic dentistry. Unfortunately, most dentists see the mouth as separate from the body. We have separate schools, we have separate insurance, we have separate tools, we have separate initials at the end of our… we have different degrees. Although, in dental school we as dentists learn a lot about the medicine. We do full anatomy. We actually break down the whole body. We have the same biochemistry, physiology, endiology, microbiology, the same course work as medicine. But as we get further along in our training, we get more and more focused on teeth. By the time you get out of school and you start going in to practice, we stop looking at the whole body. We get more and more focused on teeth, and more importantly, we get more and more focused on repairing teeth and cleaning gums. That’s how people see us. That’s what you as a patient see the dentists, as someone that repairs teeth. Let’s say you have a toothache, you go in, get rid of the toothache, and repair the tooth so that we can function. That’s what it’s boiled down to. Dentists are glorified mechanics. We fix teeth.
Well, at our office, The Center For Natural Dentistry, Dr. Stacy Godes and I focus more on your overall health. Quite frankly, isn’t it more important that your health be better than a single tooth? God gave us 32 teeth in order to eat, chew and smile with. It is important to have teeth in order for us to do those things. However, when it comes to overall health, we have to make you aware of a possible link between what’s done in the mouth that can effect your health and what’s not done in your mouth or what most dentists don’t recognize can effect your health. That’s very important, because most dentists have not had the training to know what they’re really doing to their overall health now and in the future.
What I’m going to talk about today is basically holistic dentistry. Realize that there is a range of holistic dentists. Not all dentists are the same. Not all cosmetic dentists are the same, not all implant dentists, not all oral surgeons, not all orthodontists, not all pediatric dentists, every dentist practices differently. The reason why is because they’re individuals, and every individual has different desires and different values. Some individuals will value a lot of education, some individuals will value a beautiful office and spend a lot of money making sure that it’s very nice, some dentists just value that they’re cheap and they’re profitable. Every dentist is different. You cannot group all dentists the same. One point I want to get at is that you don’t want to group all holistic dentists the same. Let me explain a little bit about what holistic dentistry is. Right now you can go on Google and you can type in holistic dentist and you’re going to have a lot of people that say they do holistic dentistry. I like to put things in a scale. You can have a scale between zero and ten. You could rate yourself. What I ask patients a lot during the initial visit or the comprehensive exam is on a scale of one to ten, zero meaning you don’t know anything about holistic dentistry or don’t even know the word, ten meaning that you are super holistic, that you eat very healthy, are very proactive, you want to know what’s in things, and you want to test, and you want to know and do the best research you can, so that you can prevent problems, because you look at the body as a whole and you want to make good decisions for yourself. On my scale I consider myself about a nine or a ten out of ten. I am extremely holistic and since I am that I make recommendations on what I would do for myself, so it can be very holistic. Out of all the holistic dentists out there, I would say I’m about a nine or a ten. Let’s go through what holistic dentistry is to me, and then let’s talk about other levels of holistic care, because there isn’t really right or wrong here. It’s just the difference between understanding and where their dentist is comfortable.
First of all, holistic dentistry is a mindset. The mindset is that holistic means whole body means we look at the body as a whole when we make recommendations and we have treatment.
I’m going to break this down into basically four levels of holistic care. The first level is level zero. Level zero is regular dentistry. Dentistry that doesn’t take into consideration holistic care. That’s like level zero on my scale, where a dentist doesn’t even know that holistic dentistry exists, or they know it exists and they want to do the opposite of it. They resist holistic dentistry, meaning that if I were to talk to them about mercury fillings, they would, in their head go, ‘mercury fillings are safe. Mercury fillings are bound together and there’s no problem.’ These are the same dentists that say, “I would put a mercury filling or an amalgam filling in my mouth. My wife has them. She has no problems, she has no health problems.” So therefore, everything revolves around their own personal experience or what they’ve learned in school, which is mercury fillings are safe. I call these level zero holistic doctors because they’re not really thinking of the big picture. The big picture is that mercury is a poison and it’s potentially toxic and not everyone has the same reactivity to it. That’s very important. Level zero dentists believe that traditional dentistry works, it’s tried and true, science has proven it, and there’s no need to make any changes. These level zero dentists believe in fluoride. They believe in root canal therapy. They believe that what they use mechanically is good enough, and they don’t understand that some people are more allergic to things than others. These are level zero dentists. These are probably the ones that do not even advertise that they do holistic dentistry, because they don’t believe in it. That’s level zero of my scale today.
Level one dentist. I’m going to tell you that five or six years ago I was learning a little bit more about nutrition. I was realizing that my overall health can be influenced by what I eat, and I didn’t really know that. I understood that fast food was bad, but I never really made the connection between fast food and health, because fast food is good. A lot of foods are good, but they may not be good for your health.
So then I started making that next level of thing and started asking myself, ‘what about my dentistry?’ The thing that I looked at when I switched over to holistic dentistry was that it makes sense that mercury fillings are not good for me. Mercury fillings are made from more than 50% mercury. They should be called mercury fillings, not silver fillings just because the color is silver, and not amalgams just because that’s the name of the process. They should be called mercury fillings, because it’s mainly made out of mercury. Then I had this understanding, because I went out and searched for more information, that mercury fillings release mercury vapor. If you don’t believe me, go online. Go to a website; it’s called the IAOMT, the International Association of Oral Medicine Toxicology. I’ve been a member for so long, I haven’t even been to their website or gone to their meetings. What they really focus on is the mercury subject. They’re trying to get mercury fillings banned, not only for the health of the individual, but also the health of the doctors and the staff in the dental office, and also the environment. We want to minimize the amount of this toxin in the body. So go to their website; you’ll find information about this.
This was my start. I would say about four or five years ago, I was a level one holistic dentist. That’s all I knew. I made a point to start a practice where we’re going to remove mercury fillings properly. There are specific protocols out there that are being used to minimize your exposure to mercury fillings. If you have mercury fillings, I encourage you to get checked to see if those mercury fillings are bad for you, and to get some suggestions on how to replace it and what to replace it with. That’s level one. Also, some level one holistic dentists will also do no fluoride. Every dentist going through school was recommended to use fluoride in our toothpaste. We should use fluoride rinse, fluoride drops, fluoride tablets, and fluoridate our water. Level one dentists may or may not believe that fluoride is good for you, or they may believe part of what I say. They may say, ‘oh, it’s bad for water fluoridation, but it’s ok to put on your teeth, like in toothpaste. The reality is that these type of dentists don’t fully know or fully believe yet that what you put in your mouth can effect your overall health. They’re more in it for the environment, or they’re in it for a marketing fad. If you go to a dental website, and they say that they do holistic dentistry, is it just a tab on their website? Meaning that they have one page about mercury fillings, or one page about fluoride, then they’re just level one holistic dentists. They just want that component of it. They may believe it, but they’re mainly just doing that because they live in an area where patients are more holistic and they’re asking to get their mercury fillings removed and they want it removed safely. That’s level one care of holistic dentists. There are a lot of level one holistic dentists out there. That’s the next step away from regular dentistry toward holistic dentistry, is level one.
Level two holistic dentists start looking more at materials that they use. They will start incorporating what’s called compatibility testing. The number one bio-compatibility testing, I should say the most popular one out there is done by Clifford Laboratories. Clifford, or they call it the Clifford Test, is done at quite a few offices. If you as a patient were to go to a level two holistic dentist and said, “I’m pretty sensitive to materials. What materials do you use?” They would go,
“Well, we use this material, because [whatever]” If you press on a little bit more and you want to know specifically what’s good for you, they’re going to recommend a Clifford Test. A Clifford Test is where you go get your blood drawn at a laboratory, then they send this blood to a laboratory in Colorado. In Colorado they are going to run some tests. At this laboratory they have a lot of different materials. Thousands and thousands of materials that have been used in the past and materials that are new and coming out. They run these materials and test them against your blood. Actually your blood serum. Then they’re going to come out with a report. It comes out with two different results. One is potentially sensitive to the material. The second variable response is not sensitive to this material. There is this long list of materials that will either say “S,” which is sensitive or “NS,” which is not sensitive. That’s what they provide back to the dentist and to the patient, so that you know if you should avoid this material or not. It just basically gives you a filter to give you a list of materials that are probably good for you. Here’s the problem that I have with this type of testing: It is not that accurate. The reason is that our bodies can change sensitivity to items. That’s an issue. The other issue is that if you’ve had any steroids in your body, meaning things like nasal spray, cortical steroids, Hydrocortisone creams, if you’ve taken any Pregnozone, any of these oral steroids or any thing like that, your body’s composition has changed for a long time. That could skew those results. So I’m not a big fan of the Clifford testing. I’ve probably only done it once or twice in the last couple years or last few years. It’s not my cup of tea. I know a lot of dentists like doing them, because that is what’s very popular. There are other laboratories that do the same thing, but that’s not how we do it at our office. We do a process call applied kinesiology or muscle testing where we can test energetically if a product is good for your environment. That’s what we do at our office. So level two dentists take things to another level and test the individual, because they know that individuals are different. They know that individuals will have a sensitivity to certain things. Some people are more sensitive than others, so we want to make sure that we focus on the products that are healthier for you. That’s very important. Go to a level two dentist. They believe that mercury fillings are poor, they believe that fluoride is not good for you, and they want to test materials, because they know that individuals are different, and we want to make sure that we choose the best product possible.
The problem with products is that there are thousands and probably tens of thousands of products out there. Every dentist can’t possibly have every single one of those products, and they can’t have experience with every single one of those products. They’re just going to use what they use most commonly. That’s how most dentists are. They use whatever is most comfortable in their hands. Be wary that level two dentists are not necessarily going to provide the best or most healthy dentistry for you that is possible.
Let’s go to the level three dentists. You’re listening to Let’s Talk Dentistry. We’re talking about different levels of holistic care. Level zero is they don’t understand it or they resist holistic care. Level one is where the dentist probably believes that fluoride is bad and that we should remove mercury fillings properly. They’re really only doing this because the patients are asking for it. Level two dentists that understand that every patient is an individual and has certain sensitivities to dental materials, because there are a lot of toxic materials in dental materials. In order to provide the best dentistry and do dentistry that’s good for you, they go ahead and do testing to make sure that the materials are good.
Level three, the final level of holistic care, is where Dr. Godes and I practice. We really look at the whole body as a whole. We really look at whether there is something in the mouth, we thoroughly look inside the mouth. More specifically, is there anything that can cause you overall health issues? We look at infections in the jaw bone. That’s our number one thing that we look at. It’s the number one thing that I think is the root cause of a lot of health problems, a lot of immune problems, a lot of chronic illnesses. That’s what a level three dentist does. We take 3D x-rays, cone beam CTs, which are low radiation CTs. We have one in our office; it’s a wonderful technology. So we can see the holes in the jaw bones which could potentially be infected with bacteria, triggering your overall health problems. It could be ruining your energetic pathways, your meridians. It could be causing cancers and other problems in your body. This is level three. This is what holistic dentistry, to me, is all about. This is where Dr. Godes and I are at. We want to figure out the cause of your overall health problems and see if it’s related to what’s going on inside your mouth.
Let me give you an example. A patient this last week didn’t tell me anything, but he had infections in his mouth. He didn’t really share too much. I found out that those infections in his mouth were possibly linked to his prostate issues. He has prostate cancer. On that same pathway with his prostate, he has infections in his teeth, in his jaw bone. It’s not necessarily because of root canals, but he has infections in the jaw bone. We are going to take care of that for him, and we’re going to unblock that pathway and see if his prostate cancer improves. We’ve seen it before, and we’ll see it in the future. Same thing goes for breast cancer. Same thing goes for a lot of other issues. If you allow your body to be freed of toxins, if you open up the pathways and you let the energy flow better in your body, your body will learn how to compensate and heal itself. We have countless stories of our office showing and people getting better because they found us, they understand us, they trust us, and they move forward with treatment. It’s pretty amazing when a dentist is a level three holistic dentist and can see infections and cavitations and understands that procedures such as root canals can cause these infections or cause them to get worse can get to the root cause and seriously help people. That’s the difference between level three dentists and other holistic dentists.
Be aware that just because a dentist says they’re holistic, does not mean that they believe all the same things. One of the questions that a lot of dentists and a lot of patients ask us is, ‘Where did you learn this?’ There is no school for this stuff; there isn’t. I wish there was. If there was going to be someone to start it, I would love to help them. What it boils down to is that you need to go to a dentist that looks at the whole picture. The reason why you have to look at the whole picture is because your health depends on it. It is that important. There are two organizations, or two websites, that train dentists on this. If you want to go to a level one dentist where they remove mercury fillings properly, then you want to go to iaomt.com. You can find it on our website, which is trynaturaldentistry.com. The other organization, which I think is more of a level two or level three holistic dentist organization, where they talk about infections and your jaw bone and your structure and materials, is the iabdm. The International Academy of Biological Dentistry and Medicine. I am board certified on that. I really think that it’s a very strong organization. You should really be looking for dentists that live that. I will tell you that not all dentists who are members of the iabdm are level three dentists.
If you want holistic care, if you want to look at the whole body, if you think that the true cause of the problem could be in your mouth and your jaw bone and your gums, then come see us. We’re The Center for Natural Dentistry. My name is Dr. Marvin. If you’re one of the first three callers right now and you do an exam will give you half off of your cleaning. We’ll take 50% off your cleaning. What a great deal. The first three callers right now. That number is 760-536-1199. I’ll see you next week same time, same place. Dr. Marvin, I’m out.