My guest today is Carol Vander Stoep, a Registered Dental Hygienist, Orofacial Myofunctional Therapist, and author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. We’ll be talking about toxic exposures in conventional dentistry and now biological dentistry can improve both your teeth and the health of your entire body. Carol has served as a board member of the Academy of Minimally Invasive Biomimetic Dentistry (AMIBD) and is a founding member of the American Academy of Oral Systemic Health (AAOSH), and the Academy of Applied Myofunctional Sciences (AAMS). She is also a member of the American Academy of Physiological Medicine and Dentistry (AAPMD. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in dental hygiene from Baylor University and has taken courses in 
orofacial myology from two of the top experts in the United States. Carol is an advocate for change in dentistry. Given the current reality of healthcare costs and delivery in this country and the central role of oral conditions in general health, she works to bring together the philosophies of those who practice biological dentistry, minimally invasive/biomimetic dentistry, neurological dentistry, and those who understand the role the mouth plays in the web of inflammatory diseases, so dentistry can offer people a chance at higher levels of health. www.mouthmattersbook.com
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
“How Biological Dentistry Can Help More Than Your Teeth”
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
GUEST: Carol Vander Stoep
DATE OF BROADCAST: October 23, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Thursday, October 23rd 2014. The sun is shining here in Clearwater, Florida. We’re going to be talking about your teeth and your mouth and biological dentistry and a whole lot of things about how what’s going on in your mouth can affect your whole, entire body.
My guest today is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s a registered dental hygienist, orofacial myofunctional therapist and author of the book Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. She’s got a lot to tell us. I think you’re going to be surprised with some of these.
Hi Carol, thanks for being here.
Carol Vander Stoep: Good morning, Debra.
DEBRA: Good morning! So there’s so much we could talk about. Could you just give us an overview to start with about some of the different ways that what’s going on with our teeth and gums and everything in our mouth can be affecting other parts of our bodies because I think that most people, first of all, think of dentistry as only teeth-oriented, maybe gums-oriented and not all the other things that you’re talking about?
Carol Vander Stoep: Yes, and I think I kind of started off with that premise when I first wrote the first edition of Mouth Matters. I was talking about how the microbes in your mouth particularly those that live slightly under the gums – a lot of people still don’t recognize that’s there a little collar of tissue that surrounds these two and that’s an imperfect casket, if you will, to keep microbes out because the lining of that tissue, of that collar is fairly permeable to the microbes that live in your body.
So whatever you allow to flourish there easily enters your bloodstream and could go to your heart and your joints and your brain and cause all kinds of problems depending upon on what kinds of microbes you have living in that pocket.
I think there’s becoming much more awareness of course now that gum disease and heart disease, they’re linked. Perhaps maybe one of the most viable germs in there or the most common is p. gingivalis. That one can have a hundred percent of the lining of all your arteries and so on and that could be as large as a tennis court.
That can really ramp up inflammation throughout your whole body. So in that way, what is living in your mouth definitely changes the inflammatory profile of what’s going on in your body.
But if you turn that around, you have to say, “Well, if you have a really good diet and a really good lifestyle and so on, you’re not going to be host to those microbes.” I’m sure most of your listeners are pretty aware of keeping a pretty healthy body.
DEBRA: Yes, yes. So before we go on, could you explain what an ‘orofacial myofunctional therapist’ is?
Carol Vander Stoep: That is a mouthful, isn’t it?
DEBRA: It certainly is. I had to practice saying that.
Carol Vander Stoep: I’m sorry?
DEBRA: I had to practice saying that, ‘orofacial myofunctional therapist’.
Carol Vander Stoep: I just say ‘myofunctional therapist’. Basically, I think that’s almost one of the most important things that I’ve covered in the last several years. I actually have a blog on it for people who want more detail. And actually, I think everybody needs to be up on it. It’s kind of dense, but every single sentence is important I think.
For instance, probably most of your listeners by now are alkalizing their diets by eating kale and spinach and raw and everything else. But the most overlooked part is breathing and developing an airway.
You can’t really stay in an appropriate neutral to slightly alkaline state without breathing correctly. That gets to be a little bit complicated, but what I think is the most important thing is that parents of children who are developing make sure that they are not mouth breathing.
A lot of times, they mouth breath due to allergies and so on in the nose and those have to be corrected because if you’re breathing through your mouth, you’re blowing off too much carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide (on page four of the blog), there’s probably 15-20 functions in your body. We’re taught that it’s a waste gas, but it’s anything but waste gas.
So what I like to do is encourage mothers who are breastfeeding as soon as the baby comes off the breast to just take their index finger and thumb and just lightly press the lips together just to give them a subtle clue that they should be nasal breathing and any time they see them with their lips open to do that.
But to go further than that, there are three main oral postures that we should all have. Our lips should be sealed. We should have our tongues completely glued front to the back to the roof of our mouth. And if that is happening, then we’re going to have a correct swallow.
I have links in my blog that’ll take you to what a correct swallow looks like and of course, explain that in more detail.
DEBRA: And is that blog at MouthMattersBook.com.
Carol Vander Stoep: It is, MouthMattersBook.com. A lot of people forget to put ‘book’ in there and then that’s not good. But yeah, it’s called ‘Facial Meltdown: Birth to Death’.
It’s really important for everyone to have these three correct oral facial postures. But for children through aged 12 whose faces are developing, it’s critical because crowded teeth are often a result of having incorrect oral posture, but even more, you’re not developing your face forward, giving yourself enough room for your tongue so that you have an airwave. There’s nothing more important than breathing.
In the United States, it looks fairly common to have a weak jaw [inaudible 00:07:23] mouth breathing and a lower tongue posture. Everyone in your audience is perhaps going, “Ha, I never thought about where my tongue is right now.”
DEBRA: Well, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m also thinking I go to a biological dentist and nobody ever said anything about this to me. They talk about straightening teeth, but they don’t talk about – and I’ve even been to chiropractors and massage therapists and all these kinds of people. This is the first time I’m ever hearing this. Of course, I saw it on your website and it’s in your book in Mouth Matters.
But particularly, I was looking at your Amazon page where people can order your book and you talk about children being able to grow up with a different facial structure, a proper facial structure by doing the right things. This is not something that we think about as even possible.
I know you’re probably familiar with Weston Price’s foundation. What Dr. Price talked about is how the food that you eat affects your bone structure. I’ve even seen pictures of different things that I’ve read where it shows pictures of people at different times in history where they ate differently than we eat now or people that live in a more less industrial way and that their facial structure is totally different.
Dr. Price who was a dentist found that they had dental problems because of the bone structure in their face. And yet this is something that I think most people, if they’re not familiar with what I’ve just said, it’s like, “I never thought of that until I saw these pictures, until I read Dr. Price’s work.”
There is a natural facial structure that comes from eating a proper diet. If you don’t do that, then everything starts being out of whack. And then all these things that you’re talking about affecting the other parts of the body because of the things that are going on in our mouth and in our head, it just is all like dominoes falling over.
Carol Vander Stoep: It is completely that. And I guess that’s why I like to talk about it because the one thing – you’re exactly right – nobody is talking about it.
DEBRA: Nobody is talking about this.
Carol Vander Stoep: We’re all looking too far down stream.
DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.
Carol Vander Stoep: And I will say something about Weston Price. Now, he’s tried about all of that with the exception of vitamin A. There doesn’t seem to be as much correlation he thought. I’m not downgrading vitamin A, but I just want to say that that’s not really part of this equation.
However, if you think about it too, his studies were showing that once they started trading and getting the sugar and the grain products, that that deteriorates it. And that’s true, but if you also think about it, what are those products, but [inaudible 00:10:30]? You have to use your teeth. There’s almost everything in our culture where we don’t really have to chew and use our teeth that well.
DEBRA: Those muscles, yeah. We need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s the author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. You can go to her website at MouthMattersBook.com. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s a registered dental hygienist and the author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. Her website is MouthMattersBook.com.
Carol, it seems like you’ve put together a lot of very interesting information, but it’s not what people are generally talking about. How did you get interested in this?
Carol Vander Stoep: Well, you can’t be a hygienist I think paying attention and not see that all the inflammatory diseases are tied together. So I think after about ten years of taking care of people, you notice that heart disease, diabetes and gum disease all go together.
I also noticed people eating more and more and more at restaurants. Not to be crude, but everybody was bleeding like crazy in their gum. That is just largely a diet thing with sugar being the main culprit.
And I have to say it’s really nice being in biological offices where the people who come to you understand a little bit more about how to eat.
But it just grew. Like I said, I started off my book from a very traditional viewpoint, but the more research you do, the more your world just widens. Actually, that was a tool for me to meet some of the top dentists in the world doing crazy, good stuff.
So I just want to point people to my ‘Avoiding the Death Spiral’ movie on my website. That’s the other passion that I have. It’s all well and good to be a biological dentist, but a really important keystone to dentistry is diagnosing early and correctly.
I think most dentists are still depending on x-rays [inaudible 00:15:35] to diagnose. It’s just 50% accurate. There’s no other way to say it. You need a little bit more of an imaging device that can tell you. Particularly with fluoride (it’s so big on the scene), it changes the way x-rays scatter through the tooth.
We’re very late in catching up on decay. So people at with a great lifestyle, but who have teeth breaking down, it’s basically the same problem as having gum disease if you have a tooth that they need to root canal or an abscess.
Any of those things are incredibly damaging to your health. And so you really have to start in the beginning by correct, early diagnosis. And that ‘Avoiding the Death Spiral’ explains that in detail and with a lot of images that people can relate to. So that’s the other set of dentists that I’ve really started resonating with.
And then for those who have already suffered from traditional dentistry (and I have an interview with Mercola on that a couple of years ago that a lot of people have tuned in on), you can’t do minimally invasive dentistry on a tooth that’s already had traditional dental care. You need to look then for a biological dentist to know how the adhesive in dentistry really work. A lot of dentists are woefully behind on learning that.
So I kind of explain what’s important about that. So I would just like to point people to that because it’s pretty complicated to explain.
DEBRA: Yeah, there’s so much that we could be talking about. It’s impossible to go into each thing in great detail.
But I want to make sure that we cover just a few key items. We’re going to talk about biological dentistry in the next segment, but before we get there, I just want you to explain something about just regular dentistry and some of the toxic exposures that people may be exposed to and even the general philosophy behind it so that they can see when we talk about ‘biological dentistry’ what the difference is.
Carol Vander Stoep: Sure! Traditional dentistry is still kind of stuck in the 1850s. They’re using old materials, they’re using old techniques like drills. Drills fracture tooth apart, which is not really good. It sets it up for future failure. Fifty percent of dentists are still using mercury to fill teeth with (so the fill, drill and fill routine).
Dentistry is still based on amputation dentistry. It’s like repairing teeth after the fact when we could be doing it so much earlier or diagnosing so much earlier. I’m a big proponent of air abrasion and ozone.
I’m sorry, what was the other part of your question?
DEBRA: Well, I just wanted you just to give a picture of what traditional dentistry is like including toxic substances that are used within that industry (we’ll call it an industry), so that when you talk about biological dentistry later, people can see the difference.
Carol Vander Stoep: Okay! Well, there’s probably nothing that’s as biological as we would like in the dental industry, I want to say that. There seems to be an idea with people that there are some totally non-toxic things in dentistry that can be used. It’s really always about trade-off
But of course, crowns are an important part of traditional dentistry. Root canals are a part of traditional dentistry if a tooth has died. There’s not a lot of testing for what each person might have a sensitivity to as far as dental material. Fluoride is the big thing for remineralization. I think fluoride and mercury are two of the big things that traditional dentistry is using.
But then also, most of the resins also have BPAs in them. You can’t totally get away from toxicity. Most of the crowns are porcelain. They use a lot of metal and they don’t pay attention to the differing metals that are in the mouth, which create – it sets your mouth up as the battery so you have all kinds of little electronic impulses running through your mouth all the time that you may or may not be able to detect, but your brain sure understands it and your body sure understands it. Traditional dentists aren’t really clued in to the electrical part of the body so much.
DEBRA: Yes.
Carol Vander Stoep: So there’s not too much natural that’s going on in dentistry to be honest. The best dentistry is no dentistry.
DEBRA: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, when we think about going back to Dr. Price, he went to these pre-industrial cultures and he found that their teeth were in really good shape, that they had broad bones so that their teeth was not all jammed together and everything fit well. It was just in a very natural environment with very natural food.
We’ll talk more about this when we come back from the break. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Our guest today is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s the author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. I have a copy of this book sitting in front of me here and it’s like 450 pages and every page has interesting information on it about dentistry and health. Well be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s a registered dental hygienist, orofacial myofunctional therapist and author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. Her website is MouthMattersBook.com.
Carol, I’m looking through. Every time we have a break, I’m continuing to look through your book. We were talking about pictures earlier of people who had good diet versus people that didn’t have good diet and how their facial structure is different.
And on page 207 of your book, you’re talking about the work that you do as a myofunctional therapist. It’s amazing the difference between you have a picture of a sister that had improper oral posture and developed whole facial balance and another sister had proper oral posture and developed good facial balance. The difference in the way they look and in our sense of beauty is amazing! It just is amazing.
I feel kind of the same way as when I looked at the Weston Price pictures. We really are designed by nature to be beautiful. And yet even in our faces, there are distortions that come from our lifestyle choices and just kind of living this skewed life that we live in the industrial world.
Carol Vander Stoep: We should have quite even facial thirds – you know, forehead, nose and then nose to chin. Mouth breathers develop a very long, narrow face. So absolutely! Aesthetically, it is not attractive. A weak jaw is never attractive.
We get used to it here. And when we see someone properly develop, I mean, those are our models. They’re beautiful, they have high cheek bones, they have sinuses, they have eyeball orbits that don’t need glasses because they’re not all squinched up. So yes, absolutely.
DEBRA: Ah, yes! Now hearing about this, I wish that my parents had known about this when I was a child. I don’t think that I have as much of a malformed face as a lot of people that I see, but I see the point. If the bones in your face are not in the proper place, then your breathing is going to be affected, your eating is going to be affected, your eyes, your vision’s going to be affected. It’s a huge thing.
Carol Vander Stoep: And apnea. I mean, it’s so rampant here. I think most people are not diagnosed because they have no idea they’re having issues – they’re choking on their tongues at night because there’s no space. And no, most doctors are not yet looking at that.
One of this might be a good point. The next thing I’m going to do is because so many people need a little help in this, I am actually going to make some myofunctional therapy companion tape, so people can kind of walk themselves through the therapy. Of course, they should see a myofunctional therapist for help, but these will be back-up tapes so people can see what these facial exercises are about.
We’re all very flaccid in our faces. Can you believe that in Brazil, actually they have 31 PhD programs in myofunctional therapy. They can even use it, women use it aesthetically for a facelift. Instead of pulling the skin up, they learn to use their muscles and it does amazing things. They get hollow cheeks. They get thicker lips. We just never think in terms of that.
DEBRA: So even adults who – this doesn’t need to be done correct when somebody is a child. Even an adult could reshape their face.
Carol Vander Stoep: They can’t totally. Your facial development is nearly completed by age 12. You really need to start on it early in order to have it forward. You can’t avoid the double jaw surgery if you want to develop airway space and so on, which has its own set of problems. But if you continue to mouth breath, at any point in time, your jaw continues to develop more vertically and your face does change.
Those who signed up for my newsletter, which is a pretty rare event, but at any rate can get some better pictures of what exactly happens there. I recommend anybody who wants to download those pictures and see what happens to a face over time if they continue to do that.
Many actors, it’s kind of painful now to watch movies and see who does and doesn’t have correct oral posture.
DEBRA: Interesting!
Carol Vander Stoep: Yes. I mean, everyone can benefit.
DEBRA: Interesting, very interesting. Yeah, yeah.
Carol Vander Stoep: People in yoga learn – oh, sorry.
DEBRA: Oh, go ahead. I was just saying how interesting it was. “People in yoga… people in yoga,” you started saying.
Carol Vander Stoep: Yeah, in yoga, they teach you to put your tongue up. Why is that? They don’t mean just the tip of the tongue, they mean all the way up. When you swallow correctly, you push up on this whole string of bones that leads to the pituitary gland and milks the hormones from that such as – well, sex hormones, growth hormones.
So it doesn’t want all the hormones that come from the pituitary. It’s a natural, little milking process that happens if you swallow correctly.
For children, you’ve got a lot of stem cells that run right along the midline of the roof of the mouth. When you rub on those, it tells your mouth to widen so you don’t have a narrow face, so you can develop tongue space and so on. I mean, that’s just a couple of interesting points.
DEBRA: Wow. Wow! Wow, wow! That was very interesting. Okay, I want to make sure that before we get to the end of the show, let’s talk about biological dentistry as a field. Can you give us a general definition of what that is and what kind of services biological dentists offer that you wouldn’t find in a regular dentist office?
Carol Vander Stoep: Well, it’s a very broad term. It’s kind of like cosmetic dentistry. Everybody has got their own interpretation. I think the two main things that they understand is that mercury is very bad for us (as we all should know), but they know how to remove mercury safely and they also will help you with the protocol as to how to also eliminate it from your body.
They often call on other people to help them with that. I have a biological movie that I’ll post soon that also kind of gives you some guidelines. A lot of people do the DMPS and DMSA and so on, chelation to pull the heavy metal out of their body, but they don’t really understand that doesn’t really pull mercury from within a cell.
So it’s very difficult to get that mercury out of your body, but they’re very, very attuned to the whole mercury removal process, which is critical. So that’s one of the big things that the biological dentists would agree on.
The same thing for fluoride. Fluoride is damaging to our bodies in so many ways and I don’t think that that’s going to surprise any of your listeners.
Some other things that they don’t think about that, methylation. Autism is looking to be having a lot to do with methylation reactions in the body. Both mercury and fluoride are terrible with depressing that particular reaction. They’re aware of that. And it’s time for a break, isn’t it?
DEBRA: It’s time for a break, yes. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s a registered dental hygienist, orofacial myofunctional therapist and author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. You can go to her website at MouthMattersBook.com where she’s got a lot more information about the things we’re talking about. We’ll be right back..
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest is Carol Vander Stoep. She’s the author of Mouth Matters: Healthy Mouth, Healthy Body. Her website is MouthMattersBook.com. So if one went to a biological dentist – first of all, how would one find a biological dentist?
Carol Vander Stoep: Well, that’s what I’m saying. There’s a broad range of understanding. But most biological dentists, the mercury, the fluoride, they don’t believe much. I think more and more of them are understanding root canal toxicity, cavitation problem. They understand that our bodies are electrical entities, some of them will use cold plasma lasers, they’ll have negative ion generators in the office. They know what kind of estrogenizers and toxic chemicals are in most of the – actually, the products that we even buy from the store like Triclosan, these little polyethylene plastic bulbs and toothpaste and things like that.
Also, most f them offer dental material compatibility testing. They’ll test for DNA. If they take out a root canal tooth and find that if the person has been suffering from ill health, quite often, they’ll facilitate a DNA test to see what was actually in that, so a patient can kind of understand maybe what the ties to the general health were.
I have an article called I think ‘Root Canal Awareness Week with a Twist’ on my blog, but it’s basically a rerun of an article I did for Dr. Mercola on May 3rd called ‘Safer & Healthier Alternative to Root Canals’ where I talk about not only how to tell if a root canal that you have – it’s very hard to get out a tooth. It’s very hard to allow one to go. It’ll help you decide whether you really need to take it out or not (I would always say yes, but anyway), how it should be properly removed so that you don’t get these serious infection in the jaw bone called a cavitaiton. I go into some detail about those things.
It’s just kind of a conglomeration of what a lot of biological dentists are thinking. I even talk about implants.
DEBRA: The biological dentist would have more of an orientation towards fewer toxic chemicals, more about preventive things that you could do to keep your teeth in good shape and things like that, yes?
Carol Vander Stoep: For the most part, [inaudible 00:41:31].
DEBRA: But they would need to be different. I’m assuming they would need to be different because I don’t think that there’s probably a standard for biological dentists?
Carol Vander Stoep: There aren’t. There aren’t. That’s what I’m trying to say. There are no standards. It’s just that everybody kind of goes off on their own direction. Some are really wild and do wonderful things, wonderful, crazy things, but others are more traditional.
I tend to like the dentists with the IBDM because they seem to understand electrical, the body electric a little bit better. But I see that some of the other dental organizations that are biological are moving in that direction. So yes, the more we learn, the more we can change our practices for the better.
I don’t think it’s out of line for people to do a lot of study and bring stuff to their biological dentists and say, “But…” For instance, a lot of them are still using a lot of nitrous oxide because patients like that. Well, nitrous oxide has got a lot of problems with it. I try to explain to my patients that it’s not healthy for them.
But yes, in general, it’s all about using the least toxic and then being as careful with mercury amalgam removal as possible and then building up your immune system. Some are really good with nutrition, so yeah. So yeah, it’s just nothing like traditional dentistry.
DEBRA: Nothing like it. Yes, a biological dentist would be what you would look for if you were going to other alternative healing kind of people instead of a medical doctor. And then a biological dentist would have more of that kind of viewpoint. And again, that is a very wide spectrum of what that might be.
And even though there’s no standard (and I’m assuming there would be no certification for a biological dentist), but there are associations.
Carol Vander Stoep: They have their own certifications, yes, if you join them.
DEBRA: Oh, good. Oh, good.
Carol Vander Stoep: And what I’m trying to say too though (what I say all the time) is really wonderful where people come in and you can see the sigh of relief like, “Oh, I can talk about this stuff to someone.” You don’t have to hide what you’re thinking just in the hopes that you’ll get some kind of dental care.
DEBRA: Yes, I understand. I understand exactly what you’re saying. I have a very good doctor that I’ve been seeing for the past four years who understands exactly what I’m saying. I’m just so grateful to have him because it’s so often you go to the doctor and you have to stop being yourself and just talk to the doctor, do what the doctor talks and be willing to do what the doctor wants you to do.
I’ve had so many arguments with medical doctors who want to put me in all kinds of drugs and I say no. I had one doctor just kick me out after the first ten minutes.
Carol Vander Stoep: Yeah, they don’t have time for you. These guys really love what they do. They understand the reasoning behind it. There’s nothing like having that relationship where you can talk about things. They may not agree with you, but you can have that discussion and hey! That’s worth everything as far as I’m concerned.
DEBRA: Yeah. It is. So I want to ask you the last question I want to ask you because we’re getting almost to the end. Going to the dentist (whether it’s a biological dentist or a regular dentist), I se two reasons to go to the dentists. One is that you’re having a problem with a tooth and the other is to be preventive like going to get your teeth cleaned and things like that.
What would be your basic advice to people about how they should care for their teeth so that they don’t have to go to the dentists, they wouldn’t end up with a problem, they wouldn’t need a root canal? What’s your basic toxic-free advice on how to care for your teeth?
DEBRA: Well, beyond diet and breathing right, which is huge (that’s the big piece of the puzzle), but brushing with baking soda particularly in the evening is a good thing because it’s got a pH of 9. And so if you want to work topically in the mouth, that’s a great thing. I love ozonated oil with picks. I’ve talked about that quite a bit in the past. And of course, flossing if you’re going to.
But basically, all things are good if you take care of your body. I think that’s what I’d want to say. I would encourage those people out there because a lot of biological dentists are not yet using the advanced imaging to detect decay. That’s really, really, really critical. I hope some of you share what you learn from ‘Avoiding the Death Spiral’ with your biological dentist because I think that’s one area where we could really grow that segment.
Doesn’t no drills sound wonderful? I mean air abrasion is just using particles to blow away the decay selectively, not a drill. I think that’s a really important part that biological dentistry should begin to embrace more. Those are the thing.
DEBRA: Do you think that people need to go to the dentist in order to have their teeth cleaned on a regular basis or can they clean them in home?
Carol Vander Stoep: Well, for my patients who are really, really leading a good, clean lifestyle, yes, I think they should go in once a year just to get everything checked over. I mean, I don’t like to call my visits a cleaning. They are preventive appointments. We talk about nutrition. We talk about their airway. I give them exercises.
DEBRA: Oh, good, yeah.
Carol Vander Stoep: I’m also kind of unusual, so…
DEBRA: Well, you are kind of unusual. I mean, my dental hygienist, I go to a biological hygienist and I don’t get any of that, all these things that you’re talking about. I don’t get any of that.
Carol Vander Stoep: Yeah, so it’s like with dentists, they embrace whatever they’re going to embrace and sometimes they can’t talk about what they want to talk about because we’re working for someone else, so we’re very limited sometimes on what we can do. A lot of it really is self-study or self-advocacy for what you’ve learned and then say, “Well, I like this.”
But I have a lot of people who are in the healthcare field who are really walking the walk and they might come in after eight years and have a pristine mouth. And then I have some people who – oh, there’s a little something like, I don’t know, maybe their mouth breathing or maybe they’re mouth breathing at night. Who knows? It’s a multitude of things that could be going on. It does take a really knowledgeable hygienist/dentist, whoever to help them piece together what might be going on.
And also, you have to monitor the cracks in teeth and things like that. So it’s good to just be monitored even if you’re pristine clean by someone. It’s just unfortunate that it’s set up as a cleaning appointment, these preventive appointments because that’s what insurance pays for. In our heads, that’s what we’re looking for. We come to get them cleaned when really, for the most part, my clients, they do come in clean now. They’ve been listening to me for years on end and they’re good. But we do find other things to refine what’s good for their health. That’s the model I’d like to see, but…
DEBRA: Yeah, I’d like to see that too because one of the things that I recognize is the more education you have about your body and how it works and what you can do to keep it healthy, the more we can do those things and the less health care/illness care we need because if we actually get real healthcare, we don’t need so much illness care.
We’re getting to the end of the show. Thank you so much for being here. Carol, I learned a lot and I’m sure my listeners learned a lot too. There’s so much more in her book that you can learn Mouth Matters. You can go to her website, MouthMattersBook.com and take a look.
I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. Be well.
Carol Vander Stoep: Thank you, Debra.
DEBRA: Thank you.
