tooth remineralization er Nara

[Guest guest]

Consumer Health Organization of Canada

Consumer Health Newsletter

VOL. 8 NOs. 3 & 4 - April / May, 1987

 

How To Enjoy Healthy Teeth & Gums -

In Spite Of Your Dentist

ROBERT O. NARA, D.D.S. Speaking at Total Health '87

 

The dental profession has the public pretty well

boondoggled into thinking that we have to go to the

dentist and get our teeth cleaned and checked every

six months and we've been conditioned to believe that

somehow or other this has something to do with our

having healthy teeth and gums. I don't particularly

believe that that's true. In fact, I believe that you

could very easily live out an entire lifetime and

never see a dentist. Every time you have your teeth

cleaned, about 2 to 3 microns of your enamel goes

away. It's a very abrating kind of process, this

business of having your teeth cleaned. In fact, I

believe that there are a lot of detrimental things

that happen in the cleaning process and the scraping

of the roots. Even in dental professional literature,

they state that there is probably some damage to the

root surfaces when they scrape with these scalers.

CALCULUS OR TARTAR:

 

I want you to think about another thing. At some time

or other you've had a tea kettle or some kind of a pot

on your stove that boils water and, over a period of

time, a scale forms on the bottom. If you've ever

looked carefully at that scale, you will find that

it's kind of dark brown in colour, kind of brittle

looking and, in fact if you scrape at it a little bit,

some of it may come off in chunks. If you look inside

your mouth and you have a large number of deposits on

your teeth, what dentists call calculus or tartar,

you'll find that it's going to look just about the

same as that stuff that collects on the bottom of your

tea kettle. The reason that it looks like it's the

same stuff, is because it is the same stuff.

 

Now, once every six months or so you could scrape the

bottom of the tea kettle and try to get that stuff

off, which would be a tough job as you can appreciate,

or you could put a little bit of vinegar in your tea

kettle and the calcium hydroxide salts that are stuck

on the bottom of your tea kettle would go back into

solution, because the acetic acid from the vinegar,

working with the calcium hydroxide, which is a base,

neutralize each other and you can dissolve the

deposits. So if I suggested that, instead of having

all that scraping all the time that we just dissolve

the tartar off of the teeth, that would make a whole

lot of sense, wouldn't it?

 

STRUCTURE OF THE TOOTH:

 

Now, let's take a look at the tooth structure. The

hard structure of a tooth is the enamel and the dentin

is underneath it. What is the tooth made of? Well,

it's primarily made of calcium and phosphorus, the

same stuff our bones are made of except there is a

little more calcium and phosphorus in the teeth than

there is in the bones. That's why they are harder. If

you fall down and break a leg and the doctor puts the

two pieces of the bone back together and puts a cast

over the whole affair so that it can't move; in about

six weeks your leg is healed. How did it heal? Did

the Doctor put some super glue in there? No, you grew

some brand new bone. In order for the bone to heal,

for the two pieces to heal back together, you grew

brand new bone. If you have a cavity, why don't we

grow some brand new enamel? Now, there is no reason

to believe that if we can grow new bone, that we can't

grow new tooth structure. There's no reason to

believe that if a substance comes out of solution and

deposits on your teeth, that it can't go back into

solution and get off of your teeth.

 

BIOLOGICAL BALANCE IN THE MOUTH:

 

I would like to talk to you about a hypothetical

situation which can take place inside of a person's

mouth, let's call it biologic balance. Let's pretend

that we have a condition inside of your mouth which is

identical to the first few hours after you were born.

Now, when you were first born, your body was

completely sterile - there was no bacteria anywhere in

your system. All the bacteria that your body takes

on, where do you get it from?

 

Your body gets it from your environment. But, at the

time that you were first born, you had saliva in your

mouth. There was no bacteria in your mouth. The

saliva at that time was, for all practical purposes,

for several days or even longer, sterile. No

bacteria. The saliva has a high concentration of

calcium and phosphorus ions, the same stuff our teeth

are made of. Our blood also has a high concentration

of calcium and phosphorus ions floating around in it.

So you see, the basic building blocks of the body are

all around. They're in the blood, they're in the

saliva, and if you have something going wrong later

on, there is no reason that these building blocks are

not available. They're there and they can work for

you. But only under the right conditions. Saliva is a

very good first-aid type fluid that helps us. It has

very beneficial effects. It also contains calcium and

phosphorus ions which are available at any time. If

you have a decent diet, you will have a pretty high

concentration of these calcium and phosphorus ions in

your saliva. If your diet is not good, you're going

to have a lower concentration of them. So obviously,

diet is very important to good dental health. Diet is

important to all health. If we don't eat right, we're

not going to be healthy no matter what.

 

BACTERIA CAUSES DECAY!

 

The dental profession has been telling us all these

years that sugar is the thing that raises all the

ruckus with our teeth. Most people that I have talked

to have said that they have a friend, or relative, who

seldom brushed, didn't clean their teeth very well and

ate candy bars till they were coming out of their

ears, and never got a single cavity. How come? The

environment wasn't right. That particular person was

immune to the types of bacteria that cause decay.

And, there are about 3 or 4 main decay-producing types

of bacteria, the two primary ones really are the

strep-mutanes, which are the big ones and then after

that comes lacto-bacillus. These bacteria, the 3 or 4

main types which attack our teeth do it by producing

toxic waste products in the form of acids that

literally eats holes in the enamel. If you want to

stop that process, the first thing you have to do is

get rid of the infection.

 

You all know what appendicitis is. That's inflammation

or infection of the appendix. You may also have

" molaritis " or " bicuspiditis " , infection of the tooth.

Dentists just refer to these things as cavities to be

filled. If you're a dentist every cavity looks like a

filling, not a healing, but a filling.

 

My wife and I have 3 children, the oldest one is a

dentist, the next oldest one is a medical doctor and

the next daughter is a physical therapist. None of

our children have ever had a cavity. They never will,

any more than there's every going to be grass growing

in this room; because the environment is not right.

Now, you can create this. It takes a little effort.

 

REMINERALIZATION OF CAVITIES:

 

Modern research has shown in the past several years

that almost every human being walking around today,

even people whose mouths are in good condition, has on

the average about 20 cavities in their mouth at all

times. And these cavities are either getting bigger

or getting smaller, and the availability of the

calcium and phosphorus ions from our saliva depositing

in these areas is the thing that keeps the teeth

healthy enough. Now, if the deposits are coming back

onto the tooth structure about as fast as they are

leaving, then your teeth stay healthy. If the reverse

is true, then a hole starts to develop. People have

asked me what they can do about some of these things?

Well, let me offer just one idea about this business

of speeding up the remineralization of cavities. If

you have a hole in the tooth, it's nothing more than

soft tooth structure; earlier it had more calcium and

phosphorus ions in it. If you want to strengthen it

and harden it, there is a mouth spray called

Zero-lube. Zero-lube was originally designed and

produced by a laboratory in the United States called

Scheer Labs, in Dallas, Texas. This product is very

unique. It was designed originally for people who had

severe radiation of the head and neck regions. What

radiation does is, it atrophies the saliva glands in

the floor of the mouth and on the side of the cheeks.

And as these saliva glands atrophy, they don't produce

saliva anymore and, if they do, it's a very small

amount. The average human being produces about a

litre of saliva every day.

 

Without it, however, people have a very dry condition

because their salivary glands have atrophied and any

dentist will tell you that the roots of the teeth, the

root surfaces, the gum areas that protect the roots,

deteriorate at an extremely rapid rate. So, this

product was originally designed to help these people

who had had excessive radiation and didn't have enough

of their own saliva to even keep their teeth wet. All

you have to do is spray with this stuff a few times a

day and you are adding a very high concentration of

the calcium and phosphate ions in your mouth, and if

you swish with it for several minutes before you spit

it out, you are actually helping to heal these areas

that have softened up. Your saliva contains these

same ions on its own and, if your teeth are perfectly

clean and your mouth is in biologic balance, you do

not need this product. In fact, when you achieve

biologic balance you don't need hardly any products

except just a toothbrush, some dental floss and maybe

an irrigator.

(See also: Demineralization and Remineralization)

 

GUM AND NECK OF THE TOOTH PROBLEMS:

 

Now, most of the people in this room are already doing

a pretty good job with a toothbrush and with floss or

tape, but the serious problem that exists today is gum

tissue problems. Once they have started, there is a

little space down between the neck of the tooth and

the tooth itself. For all practical purposes, let's

call it the neck of the tooth disease. This is the

area of the biggest amount of problem, and it seldom

gets cleaned properly because food and bacteria

collect in this space, on the outside of the tooth and

on the tongue side, and we don't really clean there

very well. The dental floss is designed to clean in

between the teeth, and the brush cleans the outside,

the biting surface and the inside, but this little

space between tooth and gum, unfortunately does not

get cleaned, or in most places not very well. Now, if

you are using a brush in a very unique manner, and if

you are young and you have used that solculus brushing

method very carefully, you can probably get by without

every using an oral irrigator. But, if you have any

dental problems, or any amount of disease or any

amount of dental recession, then it is highly

advisable that you use some form of irrigation to

clean around the neck of the tooth. The pattern of

gum tissue disease is that it is basically a problem

of not getting the neck of the tooth clean, and that

is why the disease process starts marching down the

tooth.

 

From the time I graduated from dental college I had

figured out that the Water-Pik was a pretty handy

device, because you could remove a lot of debris from

the mouth with it. In fact, the people that we have

on Water-Piks, especially with the special tips to

flush out pockets, tell me, all of them, that after

their evening mean they brush well, they use their

dental floss, they clean very well, they do everything

right. Then they use the Water-Pik with the special

tip, with their head in the sink in the bathroom, and

the food and the debris and the particles that come

out is unbelievable to them. They say, " Wow, no

wonder I have been having these problems. " So about

twenty-some years ago, with the help of my dental

staff, my wife and a couple of other people, we took

the conventional Water-Pik tip, which is kind of like

a shotgun tip, it just squirts water in every

direction, it's not very directional. We made it very

directional by adding a section of stainless steel

surgical tubing, so that instead of it squirting in

every which direction, it would squirt in a very

specific place. It's kind of like a garden hose with

a blunt end on it, that just squirts all over the

place and if you put a nozzle on it and tighten it

down and it squirts in a specific place, you can get

more pressure and you can get a better cleansing

action, and you can flush out dental pockets.

 

Pockets are nothing more than the same little space we

started off with earlier which was normal, and which

has now gotten deeper and this is called a periodontal

pocket. It's nothing more than a space between the

tooth and the gum, and the deeper they get, the more

food and the more bacteria pack down in there. And the

deeper it gets, the more it ruins the attaching

fibers.

 

If you want to know how your gum tissue sticks to your

teeth and bone, all I want you to do is think about

the Velcro that we have on clothing and wallets,

because that is how your gum tissue sticks. There are

little attaching fibers, and the minute that there is

some irritation in the depth of that first crevice

which is only about a millimetre deep when we are a

young child and a millimetre or two deep when we get

to be a teenager. If it starts to get to three or

four millimetres you have a pocket and you cannot

clean the depth of that pocket. So, this little space

that keeps getting deeper and deeper, you can't clean

it with a toothbrush, you can't clean it with dental

floss, you can go to the dentist and have it scraped

out and, generally speaking, the dentist is going to

tell you that instead of coming back every six months

for a scraping, to come back every three months for a

scraping. I call it " Scrapeodontics. " And after it

gets very bad they might tell you to come back every

one or two months for a scraping. This isn't doing

any good.

 

The net result is that, not only is it not stopping

the cause, but it is damaging the roots of the teeth

besides. So it is up to you to decide which way you

want to go, if you want to pay a little attention and

put on a little effort, you can enjoy a state of what

is called biologic balance in your mouth. And if the

depth of the pocket is not enjoying the same state of

biologic balance, then that " neck of the tooth

disease " is marching way down the neck of the tooth

headed right for the tip of the tooth and, by the time

it gets about two-thirds of the way down there, your

teeth are going to start wobbling around. There is

not enough bone left to hold the teeth in place. But,

you can grow new bone, and grow it right back up the

neck of the tooth again.

 

In October, 1977, the Journal of the American Academy

of Dentists, tells all about the bone growing right

back up the necks of the teeth.

 

When my wife and I were young and met at Michigan

State University, her mother had, at that time, five

teeth in her mouth, two on the bottom and three on the

top. She had suffered a lot of gum disease over the

years and dentists had done all of the things which

they could do. These five teeth were so wobbly that

you could move them around with your fingers, in fact,

she was already scheduled to have those removed and

have upper and lower dentures made. Her soon to be

son-in-law dentist said, now wait a minute. At least

those five teeth will help stabilize partial dentures.

It is better to have partial dentures than a full

denture. And these teeth were so loose that they were

practically ready to come out on their own. We put

her on the program of cleaning the neck of the tooth.

We eliminated the " neck of the tooth disease " in her

mouth and the bone grew back. My wife and I will

celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary this summer,

and her mother still has the five teeth. So, when

dentists tell me that you can't do these things, I

just say, " Well, Doctor, it is kind of like if you

believe that you can't do them, then you can't. "

 

VIADENT:

 

A company in Switzerland by the name of Viadent, who

consulted with me by the way, built some special tips

for their unit which is similar to the Water-Pik. It

is different in several ways and the Viadent unit

comes with four tips, two conventional tips which are

good for young people, particularly small children

because it will flush away the food and bacteria that

collects below the neck of the tooth, and the other

two (sulcus) tips that come with it are designed to

flush out pockets. Now, those of you who heard

Reverend Willhelm, heard him tell you just how

effective hydrogen peroxide was in killing bacteria.

 

If you want to get hydrogen peroxide down into the

space between the tooth and the gum, if you just rinse

your mouth with it that is partially beneficial, but

if you have pockets and spaces down along the necks of

the teeth and someone has recommended surgery for you

or whatever, then I would highly advise you to get a

unit like this and use it initially two or three times

per day and squirt the hydrogen peroxide or salt water

or salt and soda or a variety of other rinses that are

mentioned in that Issue No. 9. The Gum Tissue Issue of

the No. 9 (People's Dental Association) newsletter has

a whole page on rinses and the different variety of

rinses that are available. If you are going to stop

your own gum disease, you have to stop the bacteria.

 

So, I just want you to think about these things.

They're your teeth. They're going to be either with

you or not with you for the rest of your life. The

person that is in control is you. You are in charge of

your own dental destiny. The more you rely on the

dentist and the less you rely on yourself, the more

likely you will wind up with teeth at a ripe old age.

You're going to have to do a little homework, you're

going to have to study a little bit, you're going to

have to change your frame of reference, and you're

going to have to say, well maybe there is a better

way.

 

THE PEOPLE'S DENTAL ASSOCIATION:

 

The biggest problem that this whole situation faces is

the lack of knowledge. In the first place, the public

does not have this knowledge, but that's not really

where the problem lies. An organization in the United

States called Opinion Research Corporation did a very

extensive study to find out just why it is that

prevention and the knowledge that has been produced in

the past 20, 30, 40, 50 years, is not being practised.

Dentists practise with drills, doctors practise with

forceps, they don't practise with knowledge. And

Opinion Research Corporation set out to figure out

why. Why is this existing knowledge not being put to

use? Why is it not being taught to the public?

Opinion Research found out that the dentists don't

know. There is a big block and no communication

between the scientific world of dentistry and the

delivery system of dentistry out in the field. Also,

the practicing dentist today is not practising much

different than the dentist practised 25 years ago or

even 50 years ago. I graduated, in essence, number

one in my class from the University of Michigan in

1959 and my son graduated from the same University

with the same position in his class 25 years later,

and the courses were all the same. There wasn't one

course that had been appreciably changed in the 25

years between the time that I had left there and the

time my son left there. Nothing has been changed.

They are taught the same old mechanics. So, you have

a choice, you people that are the public can decide.

Your dentist that you have seen in the past, or even

in the future, if they choose to think in the old way,

I guess there is not much we can do about that. But

you can certainly choose to think in a new way. That

is your decision to make. I think that it is very

possible to live for a lifetime without seeing a

dentist, as long as you have this knowledge and you

break up the bacterial colonies that collect around

the teeth and gums.

 

If you don't believe that these things can work, if

you don't want to understand how they work, if you're

not willing to deal with an open mind and learn that

there may be some other ways to think about this, well

then your best bet is to just continue what dentists

have been preaching for a long time; see your dentist

twice a year, brush your teeth twice a day, and don't

eat sweets. You will then have a typical pattern of a

lot of cavities and gum problems and root canals and

all diffent kinds of things.

 

I guess there is not a whole lot I can do to change

the profession anymore, because I spent about 15 years

of my life travelling around the Dental Schools

teaching these same concepts. These same things I am

presenting to you, I have presented to over 15,000

dentists in a period of several years' time. I wrote

a thick textbook about it published by Prentice Hall

in the United States, and sold all kinds of them. I'm

sure the dentists, at least some of them read it, but

I can assure you none of them practise it. Or if so,

very, very few. And that's unfortunate. I finally

decided instead of talking to dentists and trying to

reason with them, I turned it all into a program which

can be done directly for the public, either in the

form of lectures like this and even more effectively

through the mail.

 

Everything which I am saying to you about learning and

doing is included, and there are about 15 or 20

different modern day products listed that will help

you, in addition to some old ones, like salt and soda

and peroxide and all of these things. There is no one

exact answer for any given person. So, we reduce the

whole thing down to a four-page description which is

now published in a newsletter called " The People's

Dental Association Network News " Issue No. 7. Issue

No. 7 is an overview of everything I am saying to you

here this evening. It is a synopsis of the entire

Oramedics Program that has been developed by myself

and other people, to bring people's mouths back to a

state of biologic balance.

 

Now, if you have gum tissue problems, then there is

another issue which is a condensation of about 450

research articles, all put into a four page newsletter

called " Issue No. 9 " which has to do with gum disease.

I see part of my job on the face of this earth these

days as answering the problem that Opinion Research

Corporation found out; that the scientific world and

the dental practitioner world don't communicate. So I

see my role as being a source. I can't expect you all

to go out and read a half dozen different dental

journals each month and analyze what they say and try

to figure what that means to the health of your mouth.

So, I have assumed that responsibility. I read the

Journals and determine what I think is important for

the public to know, and periodically we condense it

into an issue of a newsletter and we mail it out to

the people that belong to this organization called

" The People's Dental Association " .

 

We do issues of the Network News when we have

something important to say, if there is a breakthrough

in the field of dentistry or the health of the mouth,

we will come out with a special issue and it will be

off the presses in a matter of days. We have tried to

design this whole process so that you can conquer your

own dental disease, at home without the benefit of a

dentist. I used to worry about the fact that dentists

are not going to practise prevention, at least

probably for the rest of my life, but I don't worry

about that anymore, because by condensing these

important preventive types of knowledge into books and

pamphlets, materials and tapes and everything else we

have under the label of " Oramedics " available through

the " People's Dental Association " which is an

inexpensive way of self-help and learn at home to

conquer your own dental problems.

 

QUESTIONS:

 

Q: Will irrigation with the appropriate solution

remove the calculus that builds up around the teeth?

 

A: Well, let's reverse that question, because if you

were doing this already, no calculus would build up

around the teeth. Now, if you do have calculus there,

and if it is large deposits, you might think about

going one last time to the dentist and have them

scraped off. If they are really big deposits I would

suggest that you do that. You could dissolve it all,

but it would probably take you a better part of a

year.

 

Q: Can anything be done to reverse gum recession?

 

A: What causes recession in the first place? If there

has been recession, anywhere in the mouth, I can

pretty much assure you that it's there because there

was an episode in which the " neck of the tooth

disease " went on there earlier. If there is bacteria

of any kind in your mouth, whether it's in the bone or

around the neck of the tooth or below the gum tissue

or whatever, I know of no way to get it out of there

without squirting it out. You cannot get it out with

a toothbrush and you can't get it out with dental

floss. My morning's program covered about six

different research projects or research papers that I

quoted from, that prove to me and I think anybody who

will listen, that surgery is not the answer.

 

Read 'Money by the Mouthful' and 'How to Become

Dentally Self Sufficient' by Dr. Robet Nara.

 

 

 

 

 

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Laura

 

 

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