Expert Interview: Creating Positive Changes in Your Health

Healthy Mouth World Summit
Guest: Dr. Mark Breiner
Creating Positive Changes in Your Health Through Dentistry

Will: The next expert to share their knowledge and experience here at the Healthy Mouth World Summit is Dr. Mark Breiner. Dr. Breiner is one of the world’s foremost authorities on holistic or biological dentistry, author of the highly- acclaimed book Whole-Body Dentistry, Dr. Breiner is a well-recognized public speaker and guest on numerous radio and television shows.

He is a fellow of the Academy of General Dentistry, past president and fellow of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, and a member of the American Academy of Biological Dentistry.

Dr. Breiner also has further education in nutrition from the University of Bridgeport’s Masters in Human Nutrition. He currently spearheads the Breiner Whole Body Health Center where he works with an integrative team of dental professionals in conjunction with other health professionals supporting the wellness of the whole person.

Dr. Breiner’s talk today is titled “Creating Positive Changes in Your Health Through Dentistry.” He has chosen to share with you without questions.

Dr. Mark Breiner, welcome to the Healthy Mouth World Summit!

Dr. Breiner: Today I would like to talk about creating positive changes in your health through dentistry. Dentistry can have a profound impact on your health.

What you have in your mouth can wreak havoc or it can be for the good. I want to talk about heavy metal toxicity, electrical currents in the mouth, root canals, we’ll touch upon implants and cavitations and problems with your jaw joint and periodontal disease.

Fluoride I’m not going to cover because Dr. David Kennedy is an expert in that area, and I see he is going to be giving information on that.

The type of dentistry I do I call “whole-body dentistry.” And what is it? It’s the practice of dentistry which understands that what you do as a dentist can have profound impact on the health of the patient, either positive or negative. Dentistry is much more than being a mechanic. It’s much more than just drill, fill, and bill.

A phrase I often like to use is you only see what you know. When I was in dental school, and I’d look at an x-ray, until I was taught what a decay looked like, I would never see it on an x-ray. If you don’t know something, you’re not going to see it. And unfortunately, most dentists don’t see what we’re going to be talking about.

The first thing I’d like to talk about is mercury fillings. And here’s a picture. You can see these so-called silver fillings, these nice dark things. Well, guess what? They’re half mercury. The other half is copper, tin, zinc, and silver. And really, because the major component is mercury, they really should be called mercury fillings. But, long ago, it was decided for marketing reasons, they were going to call it silver fillings because even back in the 1830s when we started using these fillings, people knew mercury was not something that was good.

And I’m going to give you a very few scientific facts. The most important thing is to use common sense. And you’ll see the absurdity of the American Dental Association’s position. That material, those mercury fillings, before they go into the mouth, have to be handled as a hazardous material. And when I take them out of the mouth, they have to be disposed of as hazardous waste or I can be thrown in jail and fined.

Now, mercury is emitted 24-7 from these fillings. And it’s in the toxic vapor form, because as a vapor, it just goes to all your tissues and organs. They’ve shown the amount of mercury in your brain directly relates to the number of fillings in your mouth. It’s the only toxin which they found can cause the same hallmark changes in a rat’s brain as in an Alzheimer patient’s brain.

Mercury from fillings crosses the placenta to the fetus and is passed to the newborn via the mother’s milk. So, I see children who have no fillings in their mouth, but because of the mother having a lot of fillings and being mercury toxic, the babies are. And the young children that we see that can be 3, 4, or 5 years old are already having problems. And toxicologists say there’s no safe level of mercury in the human body.

Now, you look at that filling and you say, “Jeez, it’s just a little filling. How can it be a problem?” But, it’s like a slow-dripping faucet. Yes, the amount coming off is tiny. But it comes off little by little and just keeps going in. And, depending on how well you excrete it and how much you’re exposed to even from other sources such as eating a lot of fish, especially tuna fish from the cans, if you’re constipated, so you’re not eliminating properly, if your kidneys aren’t functioning

properly, all these things relate to how well you will excrete this. So, it just slowly builds up.

And to put it into perspective, you say, “Well, look at that filling. It’s so tiny.” The four-foot fluorescent light has about twelve to twenty milligrams of mercury in it. The new compact fluorescent lights have five to six milligrams of mercury.

Unfortunately, most people don’t know that you’re not allowed to throw these in the wastebasket. They have to be taken to usually a place like Home Depot or Lowe’s where they will properly dispose of these because of the mercury.

So, like I say, the compact fluorescent lights have five to six milligrams of mercury. Guess how much is in the average molar filling. 750 to 1,000 milligrams. And if I take that amount of mercury out of a molar filling and put it into a five- acre lake, you cannot eat anything out of that lake.

So, how do you test for the mercury? Well, you can do a stool test because that’s the major excretory route of mercury. You can do urine. And that seems to be the one physicians like. You can do a hair test. But, beware on the hair. People will say, “Oh, my mercury is low in the hair.” Actually, we see that if your mercury is very low in the hair, it means you’re probably not excreting it. Otherwise, it would show up in the hair.

And the way that I find is best is energetically, using equipment where we can energetically test the amount of mercury. And we can go and be very specific: how much is in the kidneys? How much is in the liver? How much is affecting the nervous system? You can be very specific with that.

What are some of the symptoms of mercury toxicity? Well, one is psychological disturbances. We’ve all heard of Mad as a Hatter from Alice in Wonderland. Well, that’s because in Danbury, Connecticut, they used to use mercury in working the felt in the hats. And people would go insane. So, they became mad as hatters.

You have oral cavity problems. A leading sign of overt mercury toxicity is bleeding gums and loose teeth. It can effect the intestines, neurologically. That’s why we see people with MS improve when this is handled. It affects your expiratory system. And I find 95% of asthma has dramatic improvement.

And depression. Most people just say, “Oh, it’s like this veil, this fog is lifted off my head. I just feel so much better.” There are many, many different disorders. And that’s why it’s very often called The Great Imposter.

And one thing I want to point out, I’m talking mercury. But it’s never just mercury. There are always other things with it, other heavy metals and other toxins, usually, are associated with it. But I warn you, do not run out to have your fillings replaced. There are steps that must be followed before and during and after.

For one thing, you have to make sure that the excretory organs are working properly before you start to take these fillings out. You have to make sure something called the mesenchyme — that’s the tissue that surrounds every cell in your body — you have to make sure that that’s not blocked.

And during the removal, we want to protect the patient. We have them breathing oxygen. We use what’s called a rubber dam to isolate the teeth. I use a powder that’s a high-sulfur powder that helps bind mercury, spread that all over the

mucosa inside the mouth before I put the rubber dam on. I use kind of like a large vacuum cleaner in front of the mouth that’ll suck the vapors. You want to use a lot of water. I like to use an electric hand piece, which cuts more efficiently. And you want to take this out in chunks to limit the amount of vapors coming off because any time you stimulate these fillings, as soon as you touch them, you’re going to have lots of mercury coming off.

And then after, you want to then start getting these metals out of the person’s system. And for that, I prefer to use homeopathics. And what do you replace these with? Well, most of the time, we’re going to replace them with something called a composite, which is a plastic-glass material. And if a person, especially, is very ill and very sensitive, we’re going to definitely want to use a compatibility test, which is a blood test where you can test for which materials are most compatible with the patient’s immune system.

I try not to do crowns. A lot of fillings that are very large, very often it’s recommend that crowns be placed if you’re going to remove these. As we’ll talk about later, the problems potentially with root canals, and because of that reason I try not to cut a tooth down for a crown. You have to kind of mutilate the tooth. And you increase the odds that there could be a root canal. So, I like to do composites even if they’re very large. And I find they hold up for years and years.

There are almost two symptoms that universally patients report back when they come in for a follow up. They say, “My energy has increased and my mind is clearer. I can think better. I can process better. Things are just sharper.”

Now, one of the things, also, when you take these fillings, which I said are half mercury and other copper, tin, zinc and silver, and you put them into a salt solution like saliva, anytime you do that, you create a battery. You create a galvanic battery. And a lot of problems I see are related to these electrical currents.

Now, there’s an instrument called the purtek where we can measure the voltage, the actual current running, and the milliwatt seconds, which is kind of the force. It’s like how much pressure behind the water coming out of a hose. So, we find it’s very beneficial. And there the numbers you see on the left are the voltage and the current and then the power.

I find a lot of problems will…patients will get out of the chair, and they’ll say, “Gee, this shoulder which has been bothering me for the last year doesn’t hurt anymore,” or “Colors are brighter.” You see, that’s because of the electrical currents we just eliminated. It’s not going to be mercury that exited that fast. It’s going to be electrical currents.

And here you can see on this slide electricity in the brain of a patient I had. She was a wife of a physician. And she would travel all over the world. She was a high-powered executive. And all of a sudden, the world would invert on her and down she’d go. And she’d been checked out in Rome, Paris, England, here at Yale, Johns Hopkins and all over.

And you know what the problem was. The problem was she had gold crowns and mercury fillings. And if you look at the upper right reading, it says “950 millivolts,” no current. Okay? So, in talking to a neurobiologist, he said, “Well, what would

happen was when that would discharge, actually current run, it’d scramble her brain. And down she’d go.” So, as you can see on the date there, it was 1993. And we took out the metals in her mouth. And she’s never had a reoccurrence since then.

Another thing that’s important is every tooth is on an acupuncture meridian and relates specifically to certain organs, tissue, vertebrae, and muscles. So, the electrical currents can also interfere with that meridian. As you can see on this chart here, this is showing the teeth. If you look up at the right side, it says “Number 17.” That’s a very important one because that’s your wisdom tooth. It’s the lower left. And your wisdom teeth relate specifically to the heart and on the lower to the small intestine.

So, a lot of heart problems in later decades are related to the wisdom teeth, the fact that they’re impacted or that they’ve been removed and you now have what’s called a cavitation, which we’ll talk about later.

But the fact is I developed an arrhythmia myself. I had a problem about 15 years ago, and it was because I had a problem on that wisdom tooth meridian where I’d had my wisdom tooth taken out in dental school. And I was able to compensate for it. But, then later on, these PVC showed up, and nothing helped it until I took care of that cavitation, that area that was interfering with energy flow.

And this is a two-way street. Your teeth can affect the organs, or the organs can affect the teeth. And I remember having once a nurse coming in and she had a terrible headache. And she said, “It’s coming from this upper right eye tooth. Please take this tooth out. I can’t take this pain.” And, see the problem was that

tooth didn’t even have a filling. The x-ray was fine. There was nothing wrong with that tooth.

The problem was the gall bladder. And that tooth was on the liver/gallbladder meridian. So, we gave her some things to help her gallbladder. And that resolved the problem. So that’s something in playing and being dental detective, it’s important to know this kind of relationship.

I want to briefly talk about root canals. And you can see on this diagram the tooth has on the outside enamel, has on the inside what’s called dentin. Then you have the pulp, where your nerve, and blood supply, lymph supply, all go in there. It’s that red that you see in the center of the tooth. Now, if you can see the dentin and the enamel, all those lines, well, those lines are like little tubules. And they’re microscopic. As a matter of fact, if you take your smallest tooth, which is your lower front tooth, and you put all those tubules end-to-end, it’s estimated that they would run for about 5 miles.

So, the problem with a root canal is when a tooth becomes infected, becomes dead, that the bacteria inside those tubules, you see, you can’t clean that out. And a root canal, that read area you see is cleaned out where the nerve and blood supply are, it’s filled with a material. But you can’t clean out all those tubules.

So, what happens is the bacteria in there go from being oxygen-loving, where they had blood supply before to nourish them, they go to being anaerobic, where they can live on a low oxygen level. And they start to give off very potent toxins.

And it’s been found that these toxins are worse than botulinum, they’re more toxic than botulinum. And the problem is that they’re a constant source of toxins.

Now, the other problem is, remember, every tooth is on an acupuncture meridian. So, having this dead tooth along this acupuncture meridian can also be a problem. I remember vividly one test, I had a professional golfer who came in because he wasn’t able to golf because he was having all these shoulder problems. And he had seen a number of orthopedic surgeons saying, “Please do surgery on my shoulder.” And they couldn’t find anything. So they said, “There’s nothing for us to do.”

Well, what happened was he had a root canal in this lower left. And that was the side where the shoulder was bothering him. And to make a long story short, we ended up deciding to take that root canaled tooth out. And he was also suffering from very severe sinus problems. He would get horrendous sinus pressure. And he’d go on antibiotic. It would help. But then as soon as he was off the antibiotic, it would be back.

So, when we took out this root canaled tooth, he immediately felt, like letting the air out of a balloon, he felt relief with his sinuses. And when he came back about 3 weeks later for a follow-up, guess what? His shoulder was also better. You see? So, originally when we took that tooth out and he felt the sinus just feel so much better, that was energetic. It was instantaneous. And then the problem was with the shoulder is he had these toxins coming down out of that tooth into the shoulder. And then he was able to go back and start golfing again.

And the symptoms from root canal also are myriad. Dr. Price did 30 years of research on root canals and found all sorts of problems as you can see here. If your body is able to quarantine those toxins and hold them at bay, you’ll be okay. But if they break out of that quarantine, then they can wreak havoc. So the safest thing to do is to not have a root canal. If the tooth is abscessed, then take the tooth out.

So, the question people ask is, “Do all root canals have to be removed?” And I just say, “Well, that’s the safest thing.” But some people say, “I don’t want to lose the tooth. I absolutely don’t want to lose the tooth.” And, that’s where energetic testing comes in. One can determine if they’re quarantining that tooth. There are things that can be done injecting ozone around the tooth. Getting other stressors off the system, getting other toxins out using homeopathic remedies.

So, you really have to know the patient. You have to get to know the patient. You have to treat this person as a whole person. You take somebody whose front tooth has a root canal, for some of them to remove that root canal would be more devastating psychologically than the root canal itself. So, there are things you can do. For me, the patients have to make the decisions. My job is to educate them. And then they have to make an informed decision.

Now, another thing I like to talk about are cavitations. Here we have a slide that’s a cross-section of the lower jawbone. And you can see this whole black area. That’s a cavitation. That’s the coratid bone. That’s dead tissue. It’s a mess. And it looks fine in the mouth. The gum would be healed over. This is an extraction site. It would look fine. But, then, if you uncovered it and went through the outer layer of bone, you fall into this mushy hole.

And cavitations are much like root canals. This area becomes a cesspool for heavy metals, for fungus, for viruses, for all sorts of things. And the symptoms from cavitations are similar to root canals. And, again, these cause a myriad of problems.

Again, it’s like the question of root canals. What do you do with these? Do they all have to be removed? Because I kind of feel like everybody has a cavitation. And the biggest site of these cavitations are the wisdom teeth area. Energetically, we can test and see what kind of affect they’re having. And if they’re having affect, they certainly should be addressed.

Now, what do you do to get rid of a cavitation? Well, one thing is I want to know, is it there? And the best way I find to do that is energetically. And here’s where I call “vibrational dentistry.” And here, I’m using equipment that tests acupuncture points and gives information about the organs along those points — the muscles, the nerves, the vertebrae, everything. And most importantly, I can see if there is a cavitation present. And I can tell if a root canal is having an adverse impact on a person.

Is it the heart it’s affecting? Is it affecting this hip that’s a problem? You can check this energetically. And I can find out if a toxin is present, like mercury. And I can quantify it. I want to know how much mercury is affecting this person. And then if we’re trying to get it out, I can track it and see if our treatment is working. Is the amount going down?

And this is a whole lecture in itself, which we don’t have time for. But needless to say, I cannot do what I do without this. For if I’m only practicing as a mechanic and ignoring these energetic relationships, you see, I can have a problem.

I love this quote: “It’s the ratio of photons to particles of matter is a constant of nature, which has a value of 9.746 x 10E + 8 photons to one nucleon.” This means the science, which only looks at matter, only covers one-billionth of all the phenomena of the cosmos and therefore can draw incorrect conclusions. And that’s why, to practice whole-body dentistry, you have to address this vibrational, this energetic aspect.

It’s like that nurse who had those headaches and she thought it was coming from the tooth. You know, if I had done a root canal on that tooth, that wouldn’t have helped her. And in the long run could have harmed her more.

So, these cavitations, you see, if it’s present and if it’s causing a problem, can be treated. I like to treat it by injecting ozone. We make a little tiny hole in the bone and we inject ozone gas. And that gas follows wherever that infection is. I like to use, in conjunction with that homeopathy, and also treat the whole body and relieve the whole body of toxins.

And then you can do surgery. Today, I infrequently have to do surgery because I get the results with the ozone and the homeopathy. And I can check energetically if treatment is being successful.

See, because of that slide where you saw that bone, it’s kind of like tunnels going off. You had that main area of the black or the dead bone. And sometimes you do

have to clean that out. But even if you do surgically, you see, you can’t get into all these tunnels going off. And that’s where the ozone gas is so helpful because it will follow into those tunnels. Sometimes I’ve injected it in the lower left wisdom tooth area and patients will feel that gas travel all the way to the other side. So, you see, surgically there’s no way you could get that. But the gas will follow. And between the gas and the homeopathy, I find really great results.

Now, the other thing we talked about is TMD: temporomandibular joint disfunction. And this is this joint in front of your ear. And this is a normal bite. You can see most of your lower teeth as you bite down. By the way, see the staining on that teeth? That’s all from fluoride. That, unfortunately, is people having fluoride in their drinking water.

Now, some of the times you’ll see this kind of bite. Somebody bites down, and you can’t even see the lower teeth. This person’s definitely got a temporomandibular joint problem because that lower jaw is being forced back.

Now, one of the things you can do is you can kind of do a self-test. Here, you can see this person can’t open very wide. You should be able to open a wide amount of the way without pain. So, one of the things you can do is you can ask yourself do you have jaw pain or tightness in the jaw muscles? Do you have ringing in your ears? Do you have ear pain, even though you have no infection present? Do you get frequent headaches or facial pain?

People that have this TMD problem have a lot of neck aches and shoulder aches. Do you find yourself clenching a lot? Do you grind your teeth at night or wake up in the morning with your teeth clenched. These are things to ask. And if

you answer in the positive to most of these, then you need to see your dentist about addressing this.

You can also put your pad of a finger — take your index finger and put it in each ear. And with the pad of your finger facing toward your nose, press your fingers forward. Is that tender? If it is, that can be because of the inflammation in the temporomandibular joint. That joint is right there in front of your ears. As you open and close, if you put your fingers in there, and open and close, you’ll feel that. And if you feel popping or clicking, that’s very often indicative of a problem.

And TMD can cause horrendous headaches. It can cause extreme vertigo. It can cause migraines. It can cause ringing in the ears. It can cause tooth pains that you’re wonder where they’re coming from. And also you have your meridians going right through that area, your stomach meridian and also an endocrine meridian. And so a lot of problems can be caused by having that joint in front of your ears not be working right.

What causes this? Well, you have heredity. Unfortunately, a lot of the time I see this caused by poor orthodontics. Poor dentistry can do this. The bite is thrown off because the person has too much dentistry. The crowns haven’t been done properly. You can have craniosacral problems. You could have had injury and trauma to your head which has thrown things off. So, there are a lot of things to cause this.

And these are things that whole-body dentistry looks at when you’re addressing the whole patient. It’s part of doing an overall exam, is to see if a person is suffering from TMD.

Now, periodontal disease. There are stages of periodontal disease. You know, you start off with, first, your gums are inflamed and they’ll bleed. They might be a little tender. They’ll be a little red. And if it isn’t addressed, it’ll progress and go into the bone.

And here’s a slide where, if you look on the left, there’s a probe that goes down under the gum. Now, normally, that probe should only be able to go just slightly below the gum. But if you start to lose bone, if the inflammation that started out initially isn’t addressed, that sets up a process where the bone, then, starts to break down. And you end up with what’s called a pocket. And these pockets are filled with bacteria.

And one of the things we like to use, and we check every patient, is we use a face contrast microscope. We want to look at what kind of bacteria, what is in a pocket? Even if they don’t have pockets, we’re going to go and check what kind of bacteria are under the gums because we want to, hopefully, if there’s a problem with the wrong kind of bacteria, we want to address it before it starts to cause the bone to be eaten away.

And here’s a slide. You can see these little snakelike guys, those are spirochetes. And spirochetes are bad guys. A certain kind of spirochete causes syphilis. Another one is associated with Lyme disease. And these here are associated with periodontal disease. So, if we see this, we know we’ve got to get this patient on a regimen by treating generally their whole system, but then giving them things to do at home to really address this and get this bacteria load down. So that’s a spirochete.

We’re also going to see amoeba a lot of times in the mouth. You don’t see these in healthy mouths. You will see this when there’s a real problem. And these periodontal bacteria, these spirochetes, have been found in atherosclerotic plaque in the heart. And this has been getting a lot of press, how there’s such an association with gum disease and heart disease. And the studies just confirmed this and there’s association.

And I don’t know. These bacteria go out. But to me, it’s more fundamental. It’s what’s underlying, what’s allowed the bacteria to multiply in the mouth that also allows you to have them showing up in the heart and in joints, things like that. That’s why it’s not enough just, really, I feel, to treat the bacteria level. But you have to treat the whole person. Several types of these bacteria have been found to be associated with heart damage. If you have these kinds of bacteria, you’re going to have 200%-300% higher the risk of heart disease.

C-reactive protein is something physicians like to look at because that shows inflammation in the body. And heart disease is really about inflammation, as any cardiologist will tell you. And, so these c-reactive protein levels, a lot of times, are because of periodontal disease. And when we get rid of the periodontal disease, the c-reactive protein goes down. So, we’ve helped the inflammation throughout the whole body.

Mothers with periodontal disease have higher incidence of pre-term, low birthweight babies. And also, these periodontal bacteria have been shown in the Alzheimer brain tissues. So, you definitely want a healthy mouth and a health periodontal situation.

Now, implants. Implants, in my mind are, if I have to weigh a root canal versus an implant, I would most likely say an implant is better because you don’t have all those bacteria in all those tubules coming out. But you still have to worry, you see, that you’re going in on an acupuncture meridian. And we don’t know what all the implications of that are.

Now, today, the main type of implant being used is a titanium implant. In Europe, they’ve used ceramic implants, and they’ve come to this country now. But I find most dentists just don’t want to place these because, frankly, they’re a pain in the neck because of the restorative situation. But, that being, I would say the ceramic would be better because you wouldn’t have the electrical currents like you would have using titanium.

And I tell a patient, if they’re going to have titanium implant put in, it’s best that they don’t have any other metals in their mouth so you don’t end up with these cross currents. But, again, we don’t know what all the implications are of going in on the acupuncture meridian.

But sometimes, again, you have to weight things. If a person has no back teeth and the only way they’re going to be able to properly chew is to have an implant so they can masticate their food and get proper nutrition, you have to weigh the health and the nutrition versus having an implant placed.

And, again, if you treat the whole person, you get all the toxins out, you get them healthy, they usually are fine. They can tolerate that insult. As human beings, we can all tolerate a certain amount of insult. It’s just when we get too much insult, when we get too much piled on that we have problems.

So, I kind of liken it to a scale that’s out of balance. On one side of the scale you’re going to have your toxins, you’re going to have your temporomandibular problem. You’re going to have root canals. You’re going to have all these things we’ve been discussing. Plus, you have other things that you’ve come into this world with that really are best addressed with homeopathic constitutional treatment.

Well, if you unload that balance scale, then if you leave something behind like, say, an implant, it’s really not going to make much difference. The scale is going to still be pretty much in balance. And that’s kind of the way I visualize it.

So, I personally am not a person who says, “Every root canal has to come out of the mouth. There should never be an implant.” There are some that do believe that. But I believe it’s really up to the patient, that it’s important to treat the whole body, to take the whole patient into consideration. And really the decision as to what’s to be done should be left up to the patient. My job is to educate the patient.

Today we have covered a number of topics. I could spend an hour or two on most of them. But our time is limited. My book Whole-Body Dentistry gives much more information than we’re able to cover here and will arm you with the knowledge you need and the proper questions to ask when looking for a holistic dentist.

My website WholeBodyDentistry.com is also loaded with information. I hope that I’ve been able to give you some idea of how dentistry can create positive changes in your health and that you have enjoyed the presentation.

Will: Thank you, Dr. Breiner, for sharing so many gems of wisdom with us here. Truly, hearing from someone who has so much experience addressing the mouth with whole-body awareness is such a gift for us all. Thank you so much!