Lyme Disease! Can Treating Dental Infections Help?

How Dental Health Affects Lyme Healing 0:00

An actual hidden possible solution to Lyme disease may be in your mouth. Dentistry has a lot of tie-ins to chronic disease. because it puts a strain on the body. And when something is straining or impacting the body, it impacts the way the body can heal. Now, I talk about this all the time. Nothing I do, nothing any doctor, nothing any supplement or pill can do is going to actually do the healing. Your body is going to do the healing. Your cells are going to do the healing. but it's all about providing them with the environment that they need and the support, the supplies, the security, the signals that they need to be able to do that healing.

How does dentistry apply to any of that? Well, interestingly enough, there's a lot of things that are in the mouth because of dentistry or that dentistry can correct that really do impact the immune system. So one of the biggies is mercury. Mercury is really impactful on the entire neurologic system. So what it does is it just slows down the healing processes and it makes the body less capable of healing from things when there is a big mercury burden

Mercury and Harmful Dental Materials 1:12

in the body. How again does that relate to dentistry? Any of those silver fillings in your mouth are actually 50% mercury and research shows that that mercury is released from those fillings literally 24 hours a day. So you are going to have higher levels of mercury in your system when you have those kinds of fillings in your mouth. What do you do about it? You safely get them removed. Make sure you watch videos that we have all about what that looks like and means to have it safely removed. But safely removing it may lighten the burden in the body so the body's able to heal from Lyme.

The next one is a lot of chemicals that we actually use in dentistry are concerning. There are BPAs, there are forever chemicals, some of the materials that we're using. So you have to make sure that you're careful to have materials that do not have BPAs in them. This is going to be the white filling materials and you're going to use zirconia or other porcelains that are not going to have forever chemicals, that are not going to have metallic elements. Just be careful about the dental materials that you're using.

The next area we need to talk about is, I think, the biggest of all, and that is the infections that could be living in your mouth. These are often infections that people are not aware of, and I get a lot of patients sent to our office specifically for this reason alone. One we talk about all the time, it's called gum disease. And interestingly enough, about 75% of adults in the United States actually have some degree of gum disease.

Gum Disease and Oral Infections 2:36

Well, that gum disease, it spreads everywhere every single time you chew. And that impacts your body's ability to fight off other things. So Lyme disease is largely a microbial problem, right? It's bugs that are really impacting the system. Well, if that's the case, your immune system is what's going to have to counteract that attack. If your immune system is already dealing with an infection elsewhere in your mouth, it can't deal as well with that infection. So, gum disease. Go get gum treatment done.

This is actually one of the easiest things to correct in dentistry. You're going to have everything cleaned very, very thoroughly in the dental office. You're going to have ozone if possible, which is going to kill everything in sight. And then you're going to keep working on this at home with high levels of vitamin C, the tooth and bone formula and vitamin D3K2 that we have on our site, as well as the tooth powder and mouthwash. Those things together are going to keep gum disease at bay. The next bigger one that I see every single day is actually areas where you had teeth removed.

Now, people don't think about this ever, right? How many of you have had your wisdom teeth removed and have never given a second thought about those sites again? We find on cone beam CT scans that sometimes those sites didn't heal as well as we thought. And it creates an area, a dead zone in the jawbone. Anywhere that there's something dead, it's going to attract bacteria and other bugs. So we find on cone beam CT scans these areas of low bone density, which indicates most likely bugs growing there.

We go in and surgically clean those out and clean out all that infection. And again, what it does is just gives the body the ability to then fight the Lyme problem instead of fighting this nonstop. The third area of infection that is probably the biggest issue I see is failed root canals. Why do they fail? Well, the problem with a root canal is simply that there's all kinds of tissue inside of the tooth, blood vessel tissue,

Failed Root Canals and Jawbone Infections 4:42

nerve tissue, that cannot be removed in a typical root canal procedure. It just can't be. So there's always going to be dead tissue left inside of that tooth, no matter how well it's done. Dead stuff attracts bugs. We already talked about this. So it is going to be a place where all those bugs are going to congregate again. What does that require? Your immune system has to deal with it. It has to fight it. Now the immune system is distracted. It can't deal with other things like Lyme infection that's happening elsewhere.

So the body's unable to take care of both things at once. And neither of them are going away without the body being able to do its job. So what do we do on failed root canals? First of all, we find them. Again, on cone beam CT scans, we see that the infection has spread and eaten away sometimes large areas of the jawbone. You can't feel it because the nerves gone. So we then recommend either retreating the root canal, which I find typically doesn't help over the long term, but I always have to give you the option or removing the tooth, cleaning out the area, getting all that infection gone and then replacing that missing tooth with a ceramic dental implant.

So again, the three things that infection or places infection can hide gums, where you had teeth removed and underneath old root canals. and that infection is chronic, low grade, so impactful on your immune system. So I have patients every single day coming and asking, do I have infection in my mouth? Is there something that could be impacting my health and causing these symptoms that I'm experiencing? I remember one young girl in particular. She was 21 years old, just at the beginning of her life.

And she was so debilitated with Lyme disease. She had headaches, joint pain, was bedridden for a lot of her day. She had tried to go to college, had to drop out. She was literally miserable. She was living at home when she should have been living her life. And her mom heard about this possibility of infections that could be impacting the immune system and not allowing her to heal. We looked at her scan, her cone beam CT scan, and we found that she had four areas that she hadn't healed properly when she had wisdom teeth removed.

And that had just been a couple of years previous. But she'd been ill those two years.

Case Study and Dental Support for Recovery 6:54

She had been diagnosed with Lyme disease and the doctor had been giving antibiotics and all of the things that everyone does. but it just wasn't moving the needle. So mom was desperate. She said, could this be related to this infection in the mouth? I said, we don't know for sure, but often it helps the body to be able to have the strength it needs to heal. So they consented, they wanted to go in, open these areas up surgically, clean them out, disinfect them. We filled them up with their own stem cells.

We did this for her. She was shocked. Within about a week's time, she was out of bed. It was a little slower getting back to school, but by the next semester, she was back to school and going full time. Now had this corrected the Lyme problem? No. But what it did is it gave less for her body to deal with. Remember, your body has to do the healing. Your body has to take care of the infection, the Lyme infection. It's the body's ability to deal with the infection that is impacted by dentistry. So many different areas that we can help you with.

including infection, metals, materials. All of these things can be assessed in one visit and we can determine is there something that we can do dentally that will give your body what it needs to heal once and for all from Lyme. So if you are looking and you are wondering if there is something that could help that you haven't done yet, this is your next stop. Check it out. So many correlations between dental disease and dental materials and other infections in the body, including Lyme.