Highlights from Jonathan Otto's interview with Jonathan Landsman, for the Depression & Anxiety Series. Jonathan discusses the connection between dental health and autoimmune disease.
Jonathan Landsman
Jonathan Landsman: So I’ve been talking about this for several years now. The most overlooked health problem in conventional and integrated medicine is poor oral health. I think this is a really important message, especially for those who are suffering with autoimmune disorders. I’m talking specifically about mercury based silver fillings, root canal treated teeth gum disease and even cavitations and, no, I’m not talking about cavities. I’m talking about cavitations, which are bone infections that are a by-product of improperly extracting teeth. All of these issues that are happening inside the mouth are definitely affecting in one way or another somebody who’s dealing with an autoimmune disorder. I mean, we all know what the symptoms are, right? We’re talking about brain fog, we’re talking about chronic fatigue, auto-immune diseases also go into things, like neurological disorders, blurred vision. The list goes on and on. All of these symptoms that people feel are a by product of chronic inflammation, right? So we’re talking about anti-inflammatories. We always hear about living an anti-inflammatory lifestyle.
Mercury based silver fillings absolutely play a huge role in people dealing with these autoimmune symptoms. For example, let me just tell you a story of somebody who I know. I did a podcast with them on Natural Health 365 and she told the story about how she was relatively okay, but had a lot of mercury based silver fillings in her mouth. She goes to the dentist one day and they replace of those mercury fillings with another mercury filling. All the drilling, all the mercury that was released into her body, literally within a week, she noticed that her eye was shutting down. She was losing all the vision in one of them and she was literally, over time, eventually diagnosed with lupus and MS. All of the simple symptoms that were crippling her really stemmed from these mercury based silver fillings. She realized that by doing research on the internet, looking at programs like this, seeing, “Wow, this release of mercury was literally poisoning the rest of my body, effecting my neurological system, effecting my vision,” and so, yes.
Without a doubt, mercury based silver fillings do have a serious impact not only on our digestive system, our immune system, but absolutely on our neurological system as well and the main message here is to make sure that when it’s time for you to deal with this and want these removed, that you make sure that you remove them safely with a well-trained biological dentist.
Well, again, it goes back to the message I’ve been talking about quite a bit about how mercury we know is a neurotoxin. So it’s definitely burdening all of our systems and in the end, simply put, it’s creating these chronic inflammation that’s in our body. We know that chronic inflammation is at the root cause of chronic fatigue, the root cause of things like brain fog, our inability to concentrate. So we experience these things every single day. But we don’t necessarily associate them to mercury based silver fillings because so often when we go to the dental office, none of this is being told to us by our conventionally trained dentists.
Okay, so this is another, I know, very sensitive topic in terms of root canal treated teeth because a lot of times, people don’t hear that root canal treated teeth could be a problem and here’s the main point I want people to understand. Once this is done to the tooth, the tooth is a dead tooth and from that dead tooth, over time, it is very easy for that tooth to be infected. Again, let me give you an example of my conversations, many, with Dr. Thomas Levee, who had an incredible experience with how Huggins, who’s a pioneer in biological dentistry. He saw firsthand how these root canal treated teeth are infected because over time, like I said, these are dead teeth that don’t circulate at all anymore, like a normal tooth does. Blood circulation, the fluid that goes through these teeth is gone once the treatment is done and then over time, this bacteria gathers around it, like mold at the bottom of a shower, and it builds up over time and then that infection doesn’t just stay around the tooth. But it spills into the rest of the body, into the bloodstream, into the lymphatics.
So again, these root canal treated teeth, they really, if they’re infected, which in many cases, according to Dr. Levee and Dr. Huggins and so many other integrative health care providers I’ve spoken to, so many of these teeth are infected and the worse part is so often, they’re not even detected by conventional X-rays where these infections are. They have to be dealt with. People must realize that to clean up these infected teeth in the mouth is gonna take a huge relief off the immune system and they’re gonna see their symptoms fade away in many cases.
I’ve mentioned before about cavitations. It’s so easy to misunderstand that to mean cavities. There’s such a big difference. Cavitations happen when someone gets a tooth extracted improperly and specifically in a simple way. You could think of it as when you pull that tooth, there are ligaments that are attached to it and in many cases, a conventionally trained dentist doesn’t always necessarily clean out the entire tooth, the ligament and that whole socket and you’ve gotta make sure that those infections and that softness that’s there inside the mouth is all cleaned away. So again, when it comes to these cavitations, the tooth is improperly extracted and then here’s the tricky part. A lot of times, people don’t feel pain at all. So yes, the gum seals up a little bit. There’s no more bleeding after a very short time. Person goes on, doesn’t feel any physical pain at all. But what happens is this improperly extracted tooth doesn’t really allow the area to properly heal. So those infections that are in the bone grow over time and, again, it’s important for people to realize that these infections don’t stay local in the mouth.
They go throughout the rest of the body. So with a cavitation, the bottom line is a person can only find out about these from getting a cone beam, which is a 3D type X-ray that’ll uncover, reveal these infections that are in the mouth and they’ve gotta go in surgically, there’s no other way around it, to get in there and to clean up all that infected bone area. So the person’s relieved from all that unwanted bacteria.
Gum disease really comes down to simply seeing a little blood in the sink when you’re brushing your teeth, right? It’s amazing to me when we even talk about this as being such a big issues that overlooked because when you think about it, nowhere else in the body, if the pinkie was bleeding or if your toe was bleeding or your leg or your arm, right away you would take care of it. But in so many cases, conventional dental offices are not really playing this up as an important thing. When you’re bleeding like that, that is a clear sign that your mouth is infected. These infections, again, will mix with saliva and go into the digestive system and people with autoimmune disorders know all the time that so many of these problems in the mouth, like gum disease that we’re talking about right now affect your digestive system and it’s also important to back step a little bit more and realize that our digestive system starts in the mouth.
The tissues in our mouth, the gums are an indication of how the rest of our tissues in our body are doing. So when we have gum disease and we have bleeding gums, that’s representative of inflammation throughout the entire body and it must be addressed because if we don’t, again, that mixes with our saliva. It goes into our digestive system and causes these conditions that so many people with autoimmune disorders are familiar with already, which is the permeability of the gut, leaky gut, which really is a big gateway, right, once that happens, to opening up our body to all kinds of unwanted debris and when that occurs, we get more and more chronic inflammation. So really what I’m talking about here is a vicious cycle. We let a little bleeding gums go by. We don’t think it’s much of a big deal. Obviously, the severity of that can get much worse and go into the bones around the mouth. But it really is affecting the rest of the body as well, our digestion, our blood and our lymphatic system.
There are a lot of things that you can do to take better care of your mouth. Let’s talk about some of the simpler things to do. Obviously, we don’t want to get rid of all the bacteria in our mouth, right? Obviously, we understand that there is a microbiome throughout our whole body. There is an oral microbiome. Yes, there’s some unfriendly bacteria in there and there’s some more friendly bacteria. But it’s important first to understand that both of those bacteria organs, those systems, work synergistically together. You don’t want to think of killing all the bacteria in your mouth. So having said that, there are still some really good things you can do at home, like hydro flossing every day, which is great. You just fill up a bucket of water. You’re squirting that water into the ... angling it towards the gumline and really cleaning out the gum area every single day. There’s salt water rinses that you can do as well. There’s even drinking and swishing around with a little lemon water as well, just alkalizing and keeping the whole system much healthier, your whole body, including your mouth, of course.
Brushing properly is another big thing. So many people, I think, brush a little too hard and they brush too hard towards their gum. So a very simple tip would be just to simply take the toothbrush itself, press it to the lining of your gum lining and your tooth and then brush away from your gums, only in that direction and not pushing bacteria and things in towards the gum. So these are all simple things that you can do, as well as, of course, eating a much healthier diet. Obviously somebody prone to more gum disease issues needs to make sure that they’re not eating sticky foods, they’re not having sugar so much and all of these things that we understand.
There’s one interesting tip that I’ve noticed even from working very closely and seeing what happened with my wife and her bleeding gum issues. It was really a chronic situation that was going for quite some time and, I mean, she was doing everything. A lot of the tips that I’ve already mentioned, in terms of hydro flossing and eating the best kind of diet and taking the best supplements, she was taking vitamin C plus Quercetin, but in liposomal form. Now what’s interesting about that is she was taking it orally, swallowing it, taking vitamin C powder, swallowing that as well because, again, we all know that vitamin C is an anti-inflammatory, reduces inflammation, should hopefully cut down on the bleeding. But then what she decided to do was swish the liposomal vitamin C Quercetin in her mouth and in doing that, it’s soaked into the gum and actually reduced the inflammation and her bleeding actually went away.
It’s an interesting point. A lot of people who obviously suffer with these autoimmune conditions or any other chronic health problem, for that matter, it’s very easy to feel depressed, to have anxiety to just feel like there’s no hope. I would say in my opinion, from everything I’ve seen in working with people over the years as an exercise physiologist and doing all the interviews that I have for my website with integrative healthcare providers that depression is very intimately involved. Yes, it’s an emotional state. But it’s really involved physically with the digestive system and that we see that the more chronically depressed somebody is, they’re just complaining all the time. They’re upset. They’re always feeling down and they have no hope. A lot of times, and I really wish a lot of the psychiatrists and a lot of the psychologists would appreciate this, a lot of times, it is a physical issue that needs to be take care of. In the gut, there’s inflammation. We know that and as we talked about before, these poor oral health problems directly affect the digestive system.
As the digestive system becomes more broken down, more burdened, more inflamed, a person’s state of mind is also deeply affected as well. We’ve heard for many years now how the gut is actually like a second brain in the body. So taking better care of the digestive system is gonna take better care about brain health and it’s absolutely going to take much better care of our emotional state.
Jonathan Otto: Well, would it be true of silver fillings in the mouth if they were off gassing everyday? Could that also contribute to depression?
Jonathan Landsman: 100%. We know in the scientific literature that heavy metal toxicity is absolutely affecting people in immune system ways, neurological ways, and mental, emotional ways as well. In fact, I mean, they had stories all the way back to the early 1900s when there was people who used to make those hats with the mercury linings. They actually have mercury in these hats and it was a mad hatter’s disease where these hat makers were literally losing their minds over the fact that they were being exposed to mercury so much and it was an interesting thing as an exercise physiologist and I was in the field for many, many years, over 30 years in health and fitness field. I had lot of dentists as clients early on and it was an interesting thing. In my western training, I often knew that, of course, depression is a problem. I noticed that a lot of dentists were always feeling very stressed out and depressed and these were people that, on the surface, were doing quite well financially. But I often associated that with, “Well, geez, they have a very stressful job.” But so many people have stressful jobs.
Why so many dentists were having depression and I only made this connection years later in spending so much more time with biological dentists who explained to me that it was all this chronic exposure to the mercury vapors in their office, day after day, drilling into these mercury fillings and exposing themselves and their dental staff, that it was really an impact on their emotional and their mental state and a lot of times, this will also show up in terms of irritability and quickness to anger. So it’s not just depression. But it’s anger issues, irritability, anxiety. If you just search in National Institutes of Health and Pub Med Search, you will see how much mercury and heavy metal toxicity is very much connected to a person’s emotional and mental state.
I want to talk a little bit about, obviously, for those who feel ready to get rid of these mercury based silver fillings. So in terms of extracting mercury based silver fillings, make sure you’re going to a well-trained biological dentists who’s gonna go through all kinds of different procedures with you. For example, oxygen in the nose, a very big suction device, a tube that’ll be put very close to your mouth to draw all the airflow away from your mouth, especially when they’re drilling those mercury fillings out of your mouth. Make sure that it’s in a special room. A lot of these biological dentists who get it have a very special dedicated room for mercury extraction where the airflow is really good, where they’re ionizing the air as well and there’s a lot of water that’s used to keep the heat down when they’re doing the drilling. There’s also other very important tips, which I had done personally, which I thought was really brilliant. My biological dentist had be rinse with charcoal. Now it doesn’t look very pretty. Your mouth is really black.
But he had me swish around a lot, this charcoal based liquid and them actually swallow it down into my body so that there would be a coating all through my esophagus and my digestive tract and of course, all throughout my mouth so that any kind of mercury that would possibly get loose would be drawn directly to that charcoal and then eliminated out of my body without it getting absorbed into my body. I spend a lot of time talking about this because if you’re suffering with an autoimmune condition or any other serious chronic health problem, it’s really important that you don’t add a toxic burden and if you get these fillings improperly removed, you could cause yourself a world of hurt. So please be careful in how you extract.