Abandoned Her Career. Lost Years to Mystery Illness. Here's What Was Actually Wrong. transcript

A woman in her early 30s had to quit the career she loved and move back in with her parents. She spent her days in bed. Her mom was afraid she wouldn't even [music] make it. She had been to doctor after doctor and no one had an answer. It wasn't in her blood. >> [music] >> It wasn't her thyroid. It wasn't just in her head. The problem was actually hiding in her jaw. And once we found it, everything changed. Years ago, I actually was sick, too.

I got so [music] sick I almost quit dentistry. Brain fog, numbness, exhaustion. Just like for this woman, doctor after doctor couldn't give me any answers. >> [music] >> Well, the cause was actually from me drilling out mercury fillings from my patients' mouths. The thing that I was doing to make my living, and I got poisoned from it. Well, that knowledge taught me that there was a lot more going on in the mouth and with dentistry, dental materials, dental procedures, than I ever knew about.

And I had been in dentistry for decades. I knew that there were things that could affect people's health in a way that really wasn't talked about. So, this knowledge gave me the insight to say, "I wonder if there's something in her mouth and in her jaw that could be leading to her problems." So, after years of specialists, tests, and treatments, that's where we started looking because nothing had worked for her. The mouth is actually medicine's blind spot.

Dentists don't look at the body. Doctors don't look in the mouth. The one place no one had checked for her was the one place holding the answer. So, what did we do? We scanned her jaw with a 3D cone beam scan, not a normal X-ray. What we found is something called a bony cavitation or a hole or dead zone in her jaw bone. Now, when we find these on this specialized scan, what it tells us is the bone didn't heal properly after a removal.

This was in the area where all of her wisdom teeth had been removed. Now, remember she was in her 30s, so this was over a decade previously. She'd had these teeth removed. But, what I saw in the scan was that the areas hadn't healed right. The bone hadn't healed properly. Well, anytime we see that on these specialized scans, it indicates something is wrong. Here's the interesting thing. I actually can't tell you what's wrong looking at the scan.

All it tells me is did this heal properly? Is the bone filled in like it should be or for a decade later? The answer was no. It hasn't healed properly. So, people will ask, well, is this an infection? I don't know. Potentially. Is this just an area that's inflamed because it's dead? I don't know. But, potentially. So, what do we do in these situations? We have to do some exploring, and that's exactly what we did with her.

So, she had four areas that hadn't healed properly according to the scan in the bone. She also had an infected old root canal tooth. Both of these things could not be seen on a regular dental x-ray. So, I really want you to understand this. This isn't something that a dentist is missing. It's not something that a dentist is even overlooking. It's something that most dentists can't see. The regular kind of dental x-rays, the kind that go in your mouth, they are looking for cavities.

They're looking for bone loss. And they're great at showing both of those things. But, they don't show us things like bone density. They don't show every nook and cranny around the end of an old root canal tooth. They don't show us the sinuses completely. They don't show so many things. So again, it's not that we're ignoring it or we're just glossing it over or we're pretending it's not there. We really can't see it inside of dentistry unless we do a specialized scan.

Now again, here you might think, "Well, I had the scan that went around my head." The kinds of scans that most people have had is called a panoramic x-ray. It does go around your head. Typically, it's done to look for if you need your wisdom teeth out, if you have some kind of pathology, a cyst, or something growing in the jaw. It can show all of that fine. However, it's not what I'm talking about. The cone beam CT scan is a specialized scan that shows everything in three dimensions.

A panoramic x-ray just shows it in two dimensions. I still can't see bone density. I can't see everything around the roots of teeth. I can't see sinuses completely and clearly. It requires this 3D scan to be able to see this. So, that's exactly what we did. We took the scan. I found this infected root canal and I found the four areas where her wisdom teeth hadn't healed properly. Now, I've performed hundreds of root canals in my career before I knew differently.

I no longer do them and the reason I no longer do them is because when you come here to my practice, Total Care Dental in Utah, we do a cone beam CT scan on every single new patient. Why? Because of what I find. Every single day, I find infected root canals. There's no symptoms. They don't hurt. The nerve is gone. Nothing hurts anymore. But I find sinuses completely blown out and filled with infection because of a failed root canal.

I find huge abscesses in the jaw bone that's affecting things downstream and elsewhere in the body, but it doesn't hurt here. So many failures around these root canals. I just couldn't in good conscience do them anymore because I see how that tooth that's dead, that has no blood flow, no nerve supply, no way to protect itself, I see what happens over the years when the body can't protect itself from bacterial infections that gather around these dead teeth.

I don't do them anymore. I've treated teeth like this and I know they have miles of tiny channels that we can't fully sterilize. It traps bacteria that turns toxic. And that infection leaks into the bloodstream. This leads to your immune system staying on high alert. Now, that shows up as fatigue, as chronic illness, not as I think something's wrong with my tooth right here. The same thing goes with those wisdom teeth areas.

It's not that these are leading to the disease, it's that they're leading to your immune system not being able to protect yourself or your body not being able to regenerate and heal like it needs to. So in that one appointment, we cleaned out every infected site in her mouth. I removed that dead tooth, we cleaned out all four of those wisdom teeth areas. Now again, are they infected? We actually don't know unless we biopsy the area.

So typically we do that. We do a biopsy, in a few weeks it comes back and tells us what's been living in there. I'm actually yet to find one that didn't have infection in these dead zones in the jaw bone. Even if they're not infected, however, anything dead in the body is going to lead to inflammation. The next day, she told me that she felt more like herself than she had in a decade. The next morning her mom found her doing the dishes.

Out of bed for the first time in years. Today, she walks 8 miles a day and finally took the trip that she never thought she'd make. Cleaning up the past dentistry gave her her life back. So, if any of this sounds like you, I made a free guide on root canals and what you can do instead. It's linked below. Now, I want you to understand not every tired person has this. Not every person facing chronic disease is, you know, due to their mouth problems.

And removing a tooth doesn't fix everything on its own. But, I'm going to tell you that if you had wisdom teeth out or any other teeth out, if you have a root canal tooth, and you're chasing symptoms with no answers, doctor after doctor, no answer after no answer, your mouth is worth checking. Ask about a cone beam scan and a cavitation evaluation. I couldn't find this kind of whole body dental care anywhere, so I built it.

The practice that I built is called Total Care Dental, and here we have multi- specialties, so we're able to diagnose, we're able to treat, we're able to take care of these cavitations, these infected root canals, all at the same time. And later, I built the clean products that could prevent this dental disease from happening in the first place, because no one should lose years of their life to something hiding in their mouth.

Your mouth and your body are not separate. They never were. If you have an old root canal and you've been wondering, watch this next. I'll show you the warning signs that a root canal has failed, [music] and exactly what I'd do about it. So, thank you for listening and learning. These are the kinds of things [music] that I share every single week. Make sure you subscribe. Thank you for coming back here, because my mission is to help you live well. >> I