Expert Interview: The Use of Ozone in Dentistry

Will: The next expert to share their knowledge and experience with us here at the Healthy Mouth World Summit is Dr. Julian Holmes. Dr. Holmes is a practicing dentist and one of the world’s leading researchers on the use of ozone in dentistry. Dr. Holmes is the president of the International Association of the Use of Ozone in Medicine and Dentistry. He co-authored with author Edward Lynch the textbook Ozone: The Revolution in Dentistry. He has literally published hundreds of articles of the benefits and safety of using ozone in dentistry.

Dr. Holmes lectures around the world on the emerging subject of ozone in dentistry. And he’s been actively teaching dentists worldwide on the protocols he and his associates have established and developed around the clinical use of ozone in dentistry. Dr. Holmes will be speaking to us today, of course, on the subject of the use of ozone in dentistry.

Dr. Julian Holmes, welcome to the Healthy Mouth World Summit!

Dr. Holmes: Well, it’s a real pleasure to be able to chat to you again. I have very fond memories of when we last met, even down to the incisor marks, which are still in embedded in my finger from last seeing and last treating your daughter. So, no surprises in some respects!

Will: [Laughs] Thank you, thank you. It’s wonderful to be talking with you, as well, again, sir. So, the title of your talk is “The Use of Ozone in Dentistry.” Can you please start by setting a baseline of understanding explaining what ozone is to our listeners?

Dr. Holmes: Yes, certainly. Ozone is a gas. It’s a naturally-occurring gas. And to put it into a world context, we have something called the ozone layer. It sits just above our breathable atmosphere. And it’s a very thin layer. It’s only somewhere around about two to three millimeters to a centimeter thick. So, it’s incredibly thin. And it’s very easily damaged. So, the whole concept of the holes in the ozone layer are really important.

Ozone stops cosmic radiation and some of the energy particles from the sun. And it absorbs that energy and breaks down into oxygen, which then reforms back into ozone. But, as usual, man has a slightly different idea of the atmosphere. And we use it to, really, dispose of most of our smokeable and waste gasses.

And, so, there are a number of really important pollutants like CFC gasses, which destroy the ozone chemically very rapidly and irreparably. So, where we have really thin areas of the ozone layer, people are exposed to more solar radiation. There’s higher instances of skin cancers.

If you took away the ozone layer itself, we would probably die of solar radiation within a short period of time. And life as we currently know it and enjoy it on earth would cease to exist. So, ozone is incredibly important in a global scale.

In a much smaller scale, ozone is actually produced by the white blood cells in every living person’s tissues and circulating blood. And this concept was first talked about by some guys from the Scripps Institute in the States, which is a research institute in the U.S.A. And, for many, many years, it was held as almost like a shining beacon by various regulatory authorities that ozone was a dangerous gas and had no use whatsoever.

Well, fortunately, the science has proven them wrong. And, we now know that white blood cells produce ozone. It’s part of the natural defense mechanisms for humans and for animals to combat viruses, bacteria, and fungi. So, you can consider ozone at two levels. You’ve got the protection from the solar radiation at a large macro scale. And in a much smaller microscale, ozone is produced within our bodies to counter potential threats and infections.

Now, we can actually harness ozone. We can make it. Those experiments were done in the 1800s. And, we can use the powerful bactericidal and virucidal and fungicidal properties to help actually combat infections in various parts of the body. And, indeed, it’s used in industry on a worldwide scale to sterilize water supplies. That has been since the late nineteenth century and the early 1900s. The whole of the London underground system was actually sterilized with ozone by the Victorians.

And, at a much later stage when computer chips started to be invented, contamination with a single bacteria can cross four or five circuit lines. So, they use ozone to sterilize and remove potential pollutants, which could short circuit the circuit boards and PCBs.

Now, in agriculture example, we use ozone to help remove pollutants from ground water, potential ground water pollutants. And, so, ozone has wide application, both in industry and in healthcare, both to protect and to destroy, depending on what application is being looked at.

So, does that really set the scene for you, Will?

Will: It does. Absolutely. And, really, perhaps before we get into…Or, I guess we can do so in both ways. I was thinking before we get into the applications that you understand ozone in dentistry and how that can be a very useful tool within the field of dentistry, maybe you could explain how ozone works on bacteria, fungi, and what not, as far as an oxidative agent.

Dr. Holmes: Yeah. Of course. Basically, the cell walls of bacteria are made of sugars. And the same with fungi, as well. Ozone is an incredibly powerful oxidant. It wants to attack sugars and proteins. And you have to remember that a virus is basically a protein molecule. The same with a newer type of infective agent, which is called a prion.

These naturally-occurring infective organisms and products are very prone to oxidation given the right environment. Now, they have learned over many, many years — mainly through abuse of antibiotics, which are a very recent and modern form to combat infection — because the effect of antibiotics is fairly slow and fairly insidious, bacteria have a fantastic reproductive cycle, which can then build in a resistance to that bug.

So, we have the emergence of a whole interesting range of multi-resistant bacterium. MRSA would be a fantastic example of that. You can feed it whatever you like. It just looks at you, says, “Thank you very much for lunch,” and goes back to work. There is not a single antibiotic which can actually affect or kill MRSA at the moment. But, yet, if you expose it to ozone, it kills it straightaway. And the key behind this instantaneous elimination of these microorganisms is that ozone attacks their basic cell walls.

You have to remember even though they are just bacteria, they have a fantastic potential to create very, very complex communities, which feed each other and are self-supporting. But, if you attack them in the right way, you can eliminate them very quickly.

Now, because they don’t have time to build up a resistance to ozone because the effect is so quick, in the probably 200 years that ozone has been used in medicine and dentistry, there’s never been a single instance or report in the literature where a bacterium, a fungus, or a virus has actually developed an immunity or resistance to ozone itself, whereas the international journals are full of reports of resistance to what we would call standard antibiotics.

And we’ll just say part of this is the abuse, not only by practitioners, but also the abuse by patients, too. I mean, we still have patients who come into my surgery that have a common cold, which is virus-related, and they want antibiotics. And we’ve almost gotten to a stage where we, because of the medical-legal aspects of treating patients, we have to practice defensive medicine. So, you give them the antibiotics in the knowledge that it’s going to cause problems, potentially, later down the line.

So, it’s a dual-edged sword, which, as clinicians, we face. We understand the fears and concerns of the general public. But at the same time, there is a necessity for a lot of education out there.

Will: Sure, sure. So, what is the molecular structure of ozone, and how does it differ from other oxidators? Like, why don’t people just use bleach?

Dr. Holmes: [Laughs] Okay. We breathe O2. So, from a strictly scientific point of view, we actually breathe dioxin. It’s basically a dioxygen molecule. It’s two oxygen molecules hooked together, which is a very stable compound. If you energize the oxygen — O2 — it breaks into O1. And it will rejoin in a number of different products. Some have existences which are measured in actually microseconds. Others are slightly long-lived.

So, if you started to investigate the type of oxygen molecules that were coming out of an ozone generator, for example, you would have somewhere around about fifty different varieties of oxygen in different excited states on different compounds on different products. The ones which we’re really interested in are O2, obviously, because that’s what keeps us alive; O- because that’s actually very reactive ;and O3, which is 3 molecules of oxygen — i.e. this is ozone — and one of those O- wants to get away as fast as it can.

So, ozone has what we’d term a half life of somewhere around about five to ten minutes, depending on the pressure and the temperature and the surrounding environment. So, if you cup your hands and then you fill it with ozone and then you open your hands, within about two or three seconds, it’s actually at the same concentration as the room into which you just released it. And, most of that ozone would have virtually disappeared by the time 20 minutes has gone past. So, it’s very reactive. It has this fantastic ability to create gradients of concentration very rapidly. And, I guess its downfall is you can’t just bottle it and make it and give it to your patients or buy a bottle of ozone across the counter because after about 15 to 20 minutes, that bottle of ozone will be just oxygen all over again.

So, you have to actually make ozone at the point of application. And that’s why we have a number of ozone generators which are used in industry and in medicine where you basically plug it into a main supply. You create a very, very large voltage so it almost looks like a blue arc. If you pass oxygen through this high-energy field, you excite the oxygen molecules. They break up into O-, and then the recombine, usually with a mixture balanced between Oxygen, O2, and ozone, O3, with a number of other products, which really don’t matter at all.

So, that’s how ozone is formed. And the reason why it is so active is because it wants to give away this oxygen molecule. It wants to react in comparison to, say, the reactivity of other common oxygens, and, we quite rightly mentioned, say, bleach. Bleach is, on a scale of 1 to 10, somewhere around about 2. Ozone is 10. There isn’t actually another stronger, naturally-occurring oxidant as ozone. It’s very, very reactive, it positively wants to get in there.

And the really interesting thing about ozone is that, say if you put it into an area of soft tissue, it doesn’t destroy it. It actually starts to release oxygen, which then converts itself into hydrogen peroxide. The hydrogen peroxide then breaks down into water and more oxygen. So, you get this concept of super oxygenated tissues, which become sterile. But, also, it switches on all the reparative mechanisms. The tissue starts to respond and heal incredibly rapidly.

Will: Right. So it functions very differently than other oxidizing agents like chlorine or other oxidizers out there?

Dr. Holmes: Well, let’s put it this way. There was an interesting report last year about a dog that was left standing in a puddle of drain cleaner, which was basically a chlorine-based drain cleaner — very strong oxidant. That type of chlorate solution destroyed this dog’s pads, and almost his feet. And this dog nearly had to be put down. You would never find that if he had stood in a puddle of ozone.