Last time, we looked at how each tooth in your mouth is a living organ and part of a living system. Each is supported by bone, attached by ligament, supplied by blood vessels, and wired directly into the nervous system. Indeed, every tooth is in constant communication with your brain, sending and receiving signals, moment by moment. It’s not abstract or mysterious. It’s electrical. And it’s not...
One day, a middle aged man showed up at a dental clinic because of a problem that had been quietly developing for years. Earlier in life, he’d injured one of his upper front teeth. Over time, it had darkened. Imaging showed that the pulp inside the tooth had been affected. When clinicians examined the tooth with advanced imaging, though, they discovered something really unusual: A thick dentin...
To a lot of people, “holistic” conjures ideas of crunchiness, being rustic, going off the grid. But while embracing the natural is certainly a part of it, the word itself is more about respecting connectedness, entirety - as in holistic dentistry, where we always treat the mouth in its relationship to the rest of the body. And sometimes, we use some pretty high tech tools to do that. Dental...
As the year winds down and we get ready to welcome 2025, many of us have begun thinking about making resolutions to transform our health and vitality. But there’s one critical aspect of wellness that often goes overlooked: the intricate connection between oral and whole body health. Your mouth isn’t an isolated system, after all. It’s a powerful indicator and influencer of your total physiology....
Trends come and go - even dentistry. One that’s really started to gain some momentum is what’s known as “biomimetic dentistry.” Simply breaking down the word gives you the basic sense of what it means. “Bio” means life; “mimetic” means imitating. That’s the goal of biomimetics: to imitate life. So biomimetic dentistry strives to restore damaged teeth using materials and techniques that replicate...
Although you can’t tell just by looking at them, every one of your teeth is a living organ. Beneath the hard outer enamel is a softer layer of dentin, and within that is the pulp. It contains nerves that signal temperature changes and pain, blood vessels that deliver nutrients and oxygen, connective tissue that supports everything else, and specialized cells that can create new dentin when...
For about 100 years now, patients have been draped with lead aprons during x-rays to protect against radiation. That made sense when x-ray technology was in its infancy. Today’s digital imaging requires far less radiation, and the radiation that is needed is far more focused. The lead apron just isn’t needed. Even the American Dental Association recently updated their guidance to reflect the new...
For ages, most dentists acted as if the mouth were completely separate from the rest of the body. Little consideration was given as to the impact of dental materials and procedures on whole body health. So we got things like amalgam fillings that constantly release neurotoxic mercury; dentists “saving” teeth by killing them, removing all their living tissue in root canal treatment; and a country...
Just as medicine has its specialties - cardiology, oncology, podiatry, and so on - so does dentistry. Periodontics, for instance, focuses on the gums, bone, and other tissues that support the teeth, while endodontics deals with the pulp and tissues around a tooth’s root. Holistic dentistry, on the other hand, doesn’t describe a specialization so much as an approach, a philosophy, a particular...
