Americans are clearly getting sicker in epic proportions. Let us begin with a few startling statistical facts. Since 1990, chronic fatigue syndrome has gone up 11,027 percent, bipolar disease in youth 10,833 percent, fibromyalgia 7,272 percent, autism 2,094 percent, celiac disease 1,111 percent, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder 819 percent, hypothyroidism 702 percent, osteoarthritis 449 percent, and sleep apnea 430 percent. The list goes on. Various changes have occurred over the past 30 years that resulted in this drastic rise.

For instance, common sense is not so common anymore. Today, healthcare providers seem to forget that everything is connected. They understand that humans begin life as a single cell, and that after many cell divisions that first cell has been turned into the trillion cells that make up the body.

The childhood song that proclaimed “…the foot bone is connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone is connected to the leg bone,” somehow got lost in medical and dental training. Let’s shed light on the facts we can no longer ignore.

Dentists see things far sooner in the mouth than a medical doctor. Just looking at the tongue, a well-trained holistic biological dentist can see it as a condensed map of the entire body for diagnostic purposes. This has been proven for centuries by Chinese medicine to be accurate and effective. Unlike modern Western medicine, Chinese medicine can attest to centuries of effectiveness.

Dentists also know common medications like proton pump inhibitors such as Prevacid and Prilosec, used for treating acid reflux, address the symptoms in the opposite way of what is needed to cure or treat. People with acid reflux need more acid—not less, yet it is treated by decreasing acid. This causes the entire systemic pH to drop to an acidic level. The drop in body pH has devastating consequences that easily show up in the mouth and can be detected sooner by dentists when they see things like unexplained bone loss around teeth and impaired bone healing. The reason for this is calcium and phosphorus get pulled from the bones and teeth to try to reduce the acidic pH levels. This further leads to a domino effect of other health issues like kidney disease, infections, mineral deficiency, dementia, pneumonia, liver disease, CVD, RA, adverse pregnancy outcomes, diabetes, metabolic syndrome and cancer.

There are far more effective ways to correctly treat acid reflux that will not have detrimental long-term health effects. Again, if one system is treated by a drug in which that drug did not consider the connections to all the other systems of the body, then the patient will get sicker and sicker without knowing why.

When a dentist recommends a night guard to prevent the wear caused by grinding of teeth, it's important to understand the underlying cause. Although stress is commonly blamed, clenching and grinding may be a sign of an airway deficiency. This can be caused by factors such as a tongue tie or oversized tonsils or inflamed tonsils and can lead to the narrowing of the airway. Tooth grinding has also been associated with elevated cortisol levels. Interestingly, heavy meals at dinner and evening indoor activities like watching TV and using phones or computers can drastically increase cortisol levels.

In addition, dentists have been putting toxic materials into patients’ mouths which ultimately affect all the human body systems. For instance, mustard gas, used in past warfare, is the same substance that is released in our bodies if we have "mummified teeth" resulting from root canal treatment. A root canal tooth is a dead organ that has been shown to release this toxin gas into our bodily systems because it becomes more gangrenous and toxic the longer it is in the body. Imagine, the only place in our body where we leave a dead organ is in our mouth.

Dentists have also been removing teeth without properly cleaning the socket and replacing it with healing/growth factors to allow the bone to fill in. This leads to dead, infected bone that is as dangerous and unhealthy as leaving a dead, infected bone in the body. These areas of poor bone healing are called ‘cavitations’ which release toxins into the body over time. Cavitations and tooth infections have been linked to insomnia, poor digestion, suicidal tendencies, trigeminal neuralgia, cancer, chronic sinusitis—the list goes on.

Dentists have been putting mercury fillings into the mouth that they cannot even flush down the drain or throw away because they require special hazardous waste removal. Yet they somehow think putting it into a patient’s tooth with which they chew every day, releasing mercury into their body with each bite, is acceptable. 

Titanium implants are commonly placed into jaws even though they are not 100 percent titanium. These implants have a percentage of mixed metals, including aluminum and nickel, to which many people are highly sensitive—so much so that they are unable to wear earrings made of these metals without getting a rash. Imagine what it is doing to the body when placed into bone.

Titanium has been the solution to replacing missing teeth for years. It was effective for some, but we must remember it is a metal in a wet environment in the mouth. This moisture leads to corrosion, which attracts bacteria on the titanium implant, and acts as a battery in the head. In a world of electromagnetic fields where 5G wi-fi is growing, this will have significant effects and cause unexplained ailments like tinnitus, headaches, and general sensitivity to the environment that patients battle every day. Thankfully, today’s patients have access to zirconia implants, a much better non-metal solution.

In today's toxic world, we must be our own advocates for our health. While modern medicine is effective for emergency acute care, it is not suitable for treating chronic diseases. Relying on quick fixes may ultimately worsen one's condition.

There is hope. Biological dentistry and functional medicine are growing every year. There are practitioners in the Twin Cities who understand that everything truly is connected. They realize that when treating chronic disease, that ‘common sense’ fact is crucial to understand. It takes courage to step out of what has become the ‘normal but not-so-common sense’ way of doing and thinking in

American healthcare. Take a few steps out of the mainstream to start drastically reversing the disease statistics that have occurred in the past 30 years.

 Holly Thompson, DDS is a biological dentist who specializes in zirconia dental implant placement at Natural Smiles Dental Care, in Shoreview. She has fellowships with The International Dental Implant Association and The Zirconia Implant Society, and is currently in the Naturopathic Physician training program though the American College of Integrative Medicine & Dentistry.

At Natural Smiles Dental Care, the team includes patients, dentists and healthcare practitioners collectively paving the way for a healthier tomorrow. Thompson is optimistic that dentistry and medicine can finally truly unite and work together to understand how the teeth and jaw are tied to overall health. Located at 3434 Lexington Ave. N., Ste. 700, Shoreview, call 651-483-9800 or visit NaturalSmilesDental.com.