The dental revolution

A subterranean revolution is taking place in dental medicine. To date, standard dentistry has operated as though teeth are inert substances entirely divorced from the rest of the body. Like carpenters or construction workers, dentists have hacked and drilled and pulled teeth like so much rotting wood, the theory being that once the rot has set in and a tooth has decayed, the only route is to clear out the decay and try to salvage what’s left.

The primary means of salvage are filling the hole with amalgam or composite, implanting a fake tooth or, in the case of root canals, removing the nerve, plugging it up with wax and leaving the dead tooth in the mouth.

As we saw in the last issue of WDDTY (October 2018), ozone – that amazing substance made of three molecules of oxygen – is transforming medicine by killing infections and helping the body to heal. But it’s also being discovered that ozone can be applied to the teeth and gums, with near miraculous results.

When early tooth decay is zapped with ozone, the decay-causing bacteria are immediately killed. And, incredibly, dentists at the vanguard of this therapy are finding that when certain minerals are also applied to the tooth in question, it remineralizes and essentially regrows.

Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, has championed a device called ‘HealOzone,’ which sends ozone through a small suction cup over an exposed cavity on the tooth in order to halt the decay and help the tooth to heal. It’s a procedure that takes just a few minutes and requires no anesthetic, not even a drill.

Some pioneering dentists are even using ozone to treat infections in or near the roots, thus curing abscesses and eliminating the need for root canal treatment. Ozone is also revolutionizing periodontal treatment, being used to kill all the bacteria causing advanced gum disease or left in cavitations – holes in the bone left when a tooth is pulled.

Needless to say, professional dental associations aren’t thrilled with a simple and cheap substance that threatens to render most of their bread-and-butter work obsolete. Imagine what would happen if teeth no longer needed to be drilled, filled or capped, or roots pulled or plugged. Imagine if all that scraping under teeth and around gums was replaced by a quick shot of this simple gas. The vast majority of a dentist’s work would no longer be necessary.

Small wonder then that most dental associations pooh-pooh ozone as unproven – despite a plethora of recent studies showing its efficacy (see our cover story). It’s also not surprising that dentists using ozone are doing so without fanfare. One holistic dentist we know was continuously branded as a quack for using ozone and other nontoxic treatments in his practice.
Perhaps the most revolutionary finding is that teeth, like the rest of the body, are dynamic entities, with the ability to regenerate when dealt with appropriately. And we are just beginning to understand how integral our teeth and gums are to the dynamics of the entire body.

Recently, Evan Brand, a functional medicine practitioner in Kentucky (www.evanbrand.com) – a healthy man under 40 – developed daily heart palpitations. For six months, he searched for the source of his problem, without success, until he isolated one potential source: his old wisdom tooth extraction sites.

He made contact with Dr Stewart Nunnally, a holistic dentist outside of Austin, Texas, who studied his X-rays and concluded that his jawbone was probably necrotic and needed cleaning out.
Brand flew to Texas, had the cavitation procedure done, and Nunnally was proved right. All four tooth extraction sites were infected under the gums and needed cleaning out with ozone.
When the necrotic bone was tested, it showed a variety of pathogenic bacteria present at “dangerously” high levels, says Brand. But the story has a happy ending.

“The first night after my procedure was the first night I did NOT have heart palpitations. My blood levels of ferritin and iron were sky high due to the inflammation caused by these infections, which was oxidizing my body (not good).”

Brand fully recovered, and there are two lessons to be learned. The first is that what happens in your mouth can affect every part of your body, thanks to the superhighway network of blood vessels in your gums, which travel to the rest of your body.

And the second is that before teeth are pulled, drilled or otherwise interfered with, all attempts should be made to keep them intact. And the best way to do so may be via this miraculous and plentiful gas.

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