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FC2O Episode 17 - Andre Hedger
36 Plays5 years ago
If you want some jaw-dropping health insights, then chatting with a leading jaw joint specialist is a good place to start. Enjoy sharing in Andre Hedger's experience as an holistic dentist and modern-day Weston Price!
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Transcript
Impact of Diet on Dental Development
00:00:00
Speaker
They eat hard food. So here we come on to problem number X. Yes, number X. So the diets in primordial countries is much harder. Then they don't have mulinexes and blenders and gerber baby foods. They have to have what? Their adult seat. And they can be chewing on leathery old built on dry meat, dry food, food that isn't soft. And they develop, because of that, wide arches.
00:00:30
Speaker
It does go with eating a harder diet. The research on arch size with diet is fascinating because they've done a lot of it. They've done it on primates, they've done it on guinea pigs, they've done it on monkeys, they've done it on pigs, they've done it on mice. What they've found is that the softer the diet, the smaller the jaw. Yes, okay.
00:00:52
Speaker
And if eventually you'll create just a liquid diet, they will not develop a lower jaw. Really? Some animals like mice. So was that, was Western Aid Price's work really the forerunner of this research you're describing? Or was there work before Western Aid Price? Western Price was right on the baton. FC2O. From chaos to water. From chaos to water.
Introduction to Andre Hedger's Holistic Approach
00:01:37
Speaker
Andrey Hedger is much more than just a dentist. Andrey has strived his whole career for excellence in dentistry which includes understanding not just a lot about teeth but the impact of dentition on the rest of the body and the rest of the body on the dentition.
00:01:50
Speaker
To give you a sense of Andrรฉ's explorations, he is a fellow of the Hypnotherapy Society and a founder member of the British Society for the Study of Cranio-Mandibular Disorders. Andrรฉ is also a member of the British Orthodontic Society and the International Association for Orthodontics. He is a member of the British Dental Acupuncture Society and the British Society for Clinical and Applied Hypnosis for Dental Phobia.
00:02:13
Speaker
He is also a member of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology and patients against mercury amalgam fillings. He is in the British Dental Society for Dental Sleep Medicine as well as several other specialist groups.
00:02:28
Speaker
Beyond his passion for holistic dentistry, Andre is a real modern-day 21st century Western aid price, exploring the far reaches of indigenous cultures where combined with some extreme climbing, Andre often assesses Aboriginal dental health and as you'll hear, generally concludes he'll be out of business if he tried to set up in what some would consider a primitive culture. We have much still to learn and Andre is going to take us on a journey into how health itself and healthy teeth are inextricably interlinked.
00:02:58
Speaker
Enjoy the show. Here we go. Welcome to another edition of FC2O with me, Matt Warden, and my guest today, Andre Hedger. Andre, welcome. Thank you for joining me. Thank you very much. So, Andre, you and I met, I believe it was about 2001, something like that, at the BNI breakfast meetings in Leatherhead
Health Implications of TMJ Issues
00:03:18
Speaker
or Fetchum, somewhere around here, somewhere local. A long time ago. It was a long time ago. It was a long time ago.
00:03:25
Speaker
It was just at a point in my career where I had been made aware of how important the TMJ was. And of course, when I was introduced to you, it was really, you know, Andre's the local dentist, but once I heard you start to speak and started to go to some of the courses that you were running and your colleagues were running,
00:03:44
Speaker
I realise that you're much more than just a standard dentist. So let's dive into the sort of journey you took into dentistry to start off with, just so that people get a feel for how you got in and how your career progressed to where you're at today. I started dentistry because I fancied that a job that was physical and actually hands-on with patients rather than prescribing drugs from behind a desk.
00:04:11
Speaker
I'm very practical with my hands. I like the idea of mechanics and fixing and mending and having a relationship where you can communicate with the patient on a more personal level than say a doctor behind his desk with his prescription pad. So I started dentistry. I qualified at Geiss hospital. I'm a bachelor of dental surgery and of the Royal College of Surgeons, I'm a nice sensor of dentistry. So I sort of got two qualifications.
00:04:41
Speaker
at that time, but I also did during my training a scholarship in South Africa. Now having trained at Geist Hospital, which my mother thought was the bee's knees, I realised when I went to South Africa that actually it wasn't. There are universities, there is training programmes around the world
00:05:02
Speaker
that on a completely different level,
Andre's Journey and Focus on Jaw Disorders
00:05:05
Speaker
in my opinion, much higher. I did feel a little bit behind of what they were studying there. And then I realized that when I qualified, I had only just begun the journey, and I must continue to learn and never stop learning. From the minute I qualified, I didn't think that I was qualified. I just thought I was licensed to start.
00:05:30
Speaker
I started in practice and started going on a lot of courses and I realised an area that we had not studied at university and they still don't study at university is the jaw joint. The relationship of the jaw joint and the teeth for me became an area that no one seemed to know about and I thought it was worthy of study. What I noticed were a number of patients, a lot of patients coming in with jaw joint problems
00:06:00
Speaker
And through my lack of knowledge, I decided that this was an area we really needed to focus on. It can cause, if you have a deranged or dislocated or damaged jaw joints, it can cause immense amount of problems. Headaches, neck aches, migraines, back aches.
00:06:19
Speaker
chronic fatigue and it can make a person very ill. Yeah, psychologically as well. Physically, they can become on what we call a spiral of despair. Yes. And the profession has no real answers for that. So the typical patient may well go and see a maxillofacial surgeon who might prescribe a splint to protect the jaw from the jaw joint. And he might
00:06:48
Speaker
put the patient on drugs. It's usually amitriptyline as an antidepressant, muscle relaxant. So that was as far as they go. They might go to a neurologist who'd do a brain scan, but they nearly all do. And that usually reveals nothing. So no one's really made the connection with the jaw. So this Tronsha patient, this great pool of patients, is not really being cared for by anyone.
00:07:17
Speaker
So I studied the study group, the British Society for the Study of Crania Mandigula Disorders. And when was that, do you remember? About 20 plus years ago. It must be 20 plus years ago, because I think I went about 19 years ago. I think it was probably about 25 years ago. And the idea was to study this and invite speakers from all over the world who were experts in that field, which we did. We had meetings where we just talked with a
00:07:46
Speaker
colleagues of the dentist were interested in this and we started to take a big interest. So the journey on that road has led me down to not just TMJ problems but muscle movement disorders. So muscle movement disorders are things like dystonia where the neck
00:08:09
Speaker
may twist to the left or the right, so torticollis is what some people call it. Basically, you get a right neck and you can't move your head forwards, or you might have it just pointing upwards. It may cause ticks. Yes, I was going to ask about that. So this is these twitches that people get. Twitches, they can be vocal. Yes, so they can Tourette's. Tourette's is another muscle movement disorder.
00:08:37
Speaker
They are all linked. They're not independent items. Tourette's is not a disorder that's separate from any other muscle movement disorder.
00:08:46
Speaker
and then blepharospasm, for example, which is chronic blinking, tick in the eye. This can be so severe that the patient can't see, functionally can't see, can't work, can't walk. And do you know the mechanism, you know, if we get a little technical, is there a described mechanism? There is a described mechanism. And how it's considered to happen, and a few papers have been written on this, which show that
00:09:15
Speaker
If the lower jaw, which is clicking or dislocated or causing a jaw joint problem, is too far placed in the skull, the head of the lower jaw bone can compress the nerve at the back of the skull.
Nerve Compression and Related Disorders
00:09:29
Speaker
A very important nerve called the auricular temporal nerve. Now, this nerve is a key player and emanates from the trigeminal nerve, which is the fifth cranial nerve, and it's a very important brain nerve. If that
00:09:46
Speaker
auricular temporal nerve is actually physically compressed or squashed. It can crossfire and send signals almost like you delayed a train at Clapham Junction. Other trains coming in can't work. In this case, what happens is when you actually squeeze or squash that nerve, it can send signals to the reticulate ganglion, which is right in the back of the brain stem.
00:10:15
Speaker
And then that can make other nerves crossfire. The key ones are the glossopharyngeal, which is the throat and swallowing nerve. And it can then affect the optic nerve, which is the eye nerve. So you can get little ticks or tremors in your eye. With the throat one, you can get a feeling of hoarseness or fullness in the throat, difficulty swallowing. You could make a vocal tick,
00:10:41
Speaker
You might shout, swear, scream, wail like a werewolf or just swear or spit. It has many manifestations and that's where Tourette's comes in. And the last nerve is the accessory nerve which can cause the shoulder to shrug, the hands to twitch, and the head to rotate. When all three nerves are affected, Tourette's,
00:11:09
Speaker
the French physician described that as a syndrome. The classic teaching for that is drug therapy and deep brain stimulation, electrodes in the brain to try to stop the firing. But what Anthony Sims in America and Dr. Brenenstach in the States and other workers in this field have found that
00:11:32
Speaker
If you decompress the TMD, basically stop the lower jaw squashing the nerve and bring the lower jaw forwards. By decompressing the nerve you can often get rid of the symptoms. Right. I've seen video of this because I say there's video of this song on YouTube maybe. It can be almost instantaneous in some cases. It can be quite dramatic. You can almost stop it in an instant.
00:11:57
Speaker
A lot of other cases, if they've been going on a long time, can take a while to do. And some don't resolve. It's almost as though the muscles are constantly fired and will not unfire even with deep depression. So my practice, it's about 80% successful. 80% is not bad, I don't think. So what the reason in the etiology is commonly is a narrow upper jaw.
00:12:27
Speaker
And as the patient grows, the lower jaw, which is on a different growth part of the manzilla, as you know, it has a preordained growth length. If it's against a narrow upper jaw, then it tends to grow backwards. And then the jaw joint gets squashed and affected because the lower jaw has a length to grow. The upper jaw is restricting it.
00:12:51
Speaker
what we call fencing, maxillary fencing, the upper jaw is the maxilla. Fencing the lower jaw and then as it grows backwards the jaw head of the jaw joint squashes back against the back of the skull. So essentially the lower jaw should fit within the upper jaw when the upper jaw isn't as big as it should be then the lower jaw grows backwards and presses against it is important. Exactly. The issue is
00:13:17
Speaker
Small upper jaw. Yes. Yes, that's a subject that we can discuss the etiology that yeah shortly, but the small upper jaw can impinge the growth of the lower jaw and then it grows back. Mm-hmm. So my interest in this subjects has grown and grown there's arteries and nerves and other Things that can be squashed. Yeah blood vessels and
00:13:44
Speaker
by the jaw being back too far, which can cause myriad of symptoms. If it causes headache, neckache, migraine, chronic pain, jaw pain, then concomitant with that, at the same time, chronic pain can lead to depression, because it just wears you down. So depression becomes a very big part of it. And if you have depression, then a lot of
00:14:10
Speaker
conventional doctors would consider depression as the problem. It's just the symptom of a mechanical dysfunction. This is an interesting thing isn't it because I'm sure we're going to get onto this a little bit later
Declining Health in Western Societies
00:14:22
Speaker
but one of the things that I've
00:14:24
Speaker
increasingly become aware of as I've understood more and more the function of the body, the interactive components of the body is that of course gut issues can also cause depression so this whole thing of microbiome and the idea that if the microbiome is out of balance then that can cause decrease in serotonin production.
00:14:45
Speaker
without enough serotonin you start to increase risk of depression. But we also know that that same imbalance in the gut microbiome can create tooth grinding. It's quite a common kind of link. Yes, so there's all these kind of interactions and tooth grinding I know is a symptom of TMJ dysfunction but can it also cause it? Well it's usually a function of it. Yes, yes. So you don't usually find people with healthy jaw joints tooth grinding. Yes, yes.
00:15:14
Speaker
About 20% of the population choose grind. About 45% of the population have a clicking or deranged jaw joint. She's quite startling. When you mention the serotonin, it's quite interesting because it should be intracellular. And in jaw joint cases, they've extracted the inflammatory fluid in the jaw joint and they've found serotonin in the jaw joint fluid and that's not the right place for it to be. They've also found in 30% of women
00:15:45
Speaker
that it contains chlamydia. And they found that the inflammatory products that you would imagine to be there.
00:15:57
Speaker
hyaluronic acid and arachidonic acid and the other inflammatory products. It's almost toxic soup when the jaw is deranged. Wow, that's amazing. And that is what can cause the extreme pain. And it's a chlamydia, and obviously it's best known as a sexually transmitted disease, but is it?
00:16:16
Speaker
Is it because it's anaerobic and it can survive in that environment? Exactly. Because it's not vascularly being supported because it's been compressed. So there's a whole neurovascular bundle about 6mm wide at the back of the jaw joint which is sacred and the lower jaw should never encroach into that space. It's highly sensitive, highly innervated.
00:16:40
Speaker
and if the lower jaw is back and squashing that whole complex and reducing it to no millimeters, then the pain can be extraordinary. And that's why that group of patients has formed dozens of forums and patient groups and is really finding that the
00:17:00
Speaker
medical profession hasn't really got the answer for them. Right, right. And can I just ask, you know the little pinky test that you taught me, which is to put your little pinky fingers in your ears and open and close the jaw? Yes. And you shouldn't really be able to feel compression there as you close the jaw, is that right? That's right. So if you put your little fingers in your ears with a soft pad pointing forwards, put it quite away in your ears, open and close, and when you bite on it, you bite on your teeth, not on your fingers, but you bite on your teeth
00:17:29
Speaker
If you feel the jaw joint squashing your fingers, then it's usually too far back. And also you would feel and you can feel the clicks grating and grinding that's going in a deranged jaw joint where something's wrong with it really clearly yourself. It's a very good test. So for a patient, they might want to try that because you can't always hear them and you can't feel them by just touching the outside of your ear. Sometimes that test is really definitive.
00:17:59
Speaker
The other thing, when you open your drawer, it should be in a straight line. And it should open about 50 millimeters. The average is 52. So if you can't open in that range, you've limited opening, it deviates, it kicks and grates, then there could be an issue for you.
00:18:18
Speaker
So the small magzilla is usually the devil, and the angel is the lower jaw. So we've got to look at the cause, which is the devil. And that's another story of how do we develop that, or why have we all got narrow upper arches in the west? So would you like me to expand on that? Yeah, well, yeah, I'd love you to.
00:18:48
Speaker
No, I think that would be great because that leads us into so many other areas. And I'm fascinated to see where you go with it because I've got a few ideas myself, but I want to hear where you go with it. So let's start. So I would start with modern Western society has been quite sick and environmentally, structurally, physically, emotionally,
00:19:12
Speaker
I feel that the West is beginning to go backwards, de-evolution, not evolution. And it starts with preconception. It starts with the woman and the man. I don't think that the quality of the sperm is as high as it was. I think a lot of women have issues with candida.
00:19:40
Speaker
And they're not as healthy as they could be when they're conceiving. They're exposed to a world of toxins. They're exposed to antibiotics in their diet from animal feed and from taking antibiotics themselves. They're exposed to hormones in the form of the contraceptive pill before they decide to have children. And they've got hormones in the food. Their health of the vagina
00:20:10
Speaker
is usually poor and it's usually very laden in Canada and hasn't got the right bio. Just to jump in, I always think that the word gynaecology is quite an interesting one, isn't it? Because gyn means womb and ecology is the ecology of the womb. So it's the
00:20:32
Speaker
flora and fauna, if you like, of that area. And we often just see it as diseases or issues, medical issues there, but actually it's really to do with the biome there. Exactly. And I think our nutrition in the West is very poor. We're already showing that sperm counts are going down, fertility is going down, women are having children a lot later. So the woman conceives eventually, somehow.
00:21:03
Speaker
and the baby grows and the woman delivers the baby. So this is the second stage of where I see it going. I think all delivery should be done vertically in a squatting position. Now I've traveled extensively around the world. I've just come back from Madagascar, three weeks. And I've been in Mali and Ethiopia and Yemen and Eritrea and Morocco and Algeria. So I've seen
00:21:33
Speaker
In those countries, they don't go to hospital and lie down. They squat for delivery. But they can also, as people, squat. They'll often be seen squatting at the side of the road waiting for a lift or transport. Now us in the West, we can't squat for long, a squiggly squat. I can hardly squat for five minutes. I think it would nearly kill me.
00:21:59
Speaker
But I think for women, they should have some method of delivering the baby vertically, whether they're supported, which they would need to be, maybe in a bath or some medium that takes the weight of them. Because if they're not, the force of birth is nearly 30% more required if you're laying on your back, according to some papers like that.
00:22:22
Speaker
So if you're exerting more force on the baby as it's coming out, you're distorting the cranium more, you're actually stressing the baby more as it comes out. And a lot of births now aren't even being able to be done, vaginally, they're being done caesarean. And the birth when it happens, even with a caesarean, it's very distorting to kill the baby because the baby's often very engaged.
00:22:48
Speaker
at that point, which I hadn't considered, I'd considered that the bagel would come out much more perfect, but no, not so. So they come down the birth canal and the first mouthfuls and the first exposure to bacteria, which would hopefully colonize their gut, this candida or thrush, because it's often very infected on the way down.
00:23:12
Speaker
which is not a great start for a baby to start with an infection of thrush in the gut because then it doesn't help them form a good microbiome in the gut at all. They're up to a sticky wicket. They're often very cranially distorted. Usually the left temporal bone in the cheek is more inward, internally rotated, we say, than the right.
00:23:41
Speaker
and the left side of the face is usually smaller than the right side of the face, quite distorted. I personally am a great believer in cranial osteopaths getting the baby in the first week to try to straighten them up. So I paid for my three children to have that service done.
00:24:00
Speaker
because I think once the distortion is left in too long, it's like a bent sapling, it'll be a bent tree. Very easy to straighten at that early stage. So now we've got a baby that's born that's got the wrong gut flora. It's got a distorted face that no one's corrected. And it comes into the world because of the wrong gut flora,
00:24:28
Speaker
It's also going to be more prone to becoming allergic. And the mother tries to feed the baby, and this is the mother. And I'm not a mother, so I can't really criticize. I don't think the breastfeeding is done long enough. I think the breastfeeding is done the wrong way. So the next issue is the baby's being breastfed horizontally, like in a cradle, like cuddled.
00:24:58
Speaker
And it should be breastfed vertically. Right. As all African peoples do. Do they? Okay. All primitive people breastfeed them vertically. And is that because they're sort of straddling the hip? The baby or? Straddling the hip, yes. They just don't believe in laying them flat. Yeah. Now if you, if I invited you here and said, would you like to have a drink with me? And we're going to lie on the floor to drink that. So it would be very difficult. Yeah. And it's very much the same with the baby as they're trying to suck off.
00:25:28
Speaker
they're struggling to breathe, cycling and breathing at the same time. If the milk's too prolific, then they develop tongue thrust to stop the flow. And as they push that tongue forwards to try and stop the flow so they can breathe, then there becomes all sorts of issues with aberrant tongue swallowing. Yes. And can I just ask you, does that also tie in with
00:25:53
Speaker
being bottle fed as well, because I know tongue thrust is a very complex topic. We'll come onto that because that's the next part. So what happens in breastfeeding, especially if you do it correctly, vertically, and the breastfeeding should go on for a year at least, not just a month or so. Many of them, even my own children, haven't
00:26:15
Speaker
persevered as long as I'd like with my grandchildren. No, no, no, no, no. Now they're very active suckling. The nipple goes right down into their throat. It elongates hugely, maybe an inch and a half, hard to imagine. And to suckle, the baby has to pump the nipple right against the palate in a rhythmical,
00:26:46
Speaker
method, which is basically expanding the palate as it's doing it. And so good expansion of the palate from day one is generated by good breastfeeding. So a white palate, you'll see more of those in people with breastfeed. If the mother stops all too soon, as they often do, or says they can't, which is a hard thing to swallow because if they were in
00:27:11
Speaker
primitive country the baby would die but I don't think they would stop yes that's right that's just a person well I've seen figures on that as well and I can't remember the exact figure so I won't try to spout them out but it was the case
00:27:26
Speaker
It was in Sudan when there was famine there and they had the Red Cross, one of these big centers there. You might have even told me this figure, but I seem to remember reading it. And essentially, you know, the question is like how many of the children born during that famine period were breastfed. And the answer was that every single one of them was. And so, to me, I mean, like you say, you have to be very careful as a man giving women advice. And yes, exactly. But at the same time, when the chips are down,
00:27:56
Speaker
And that's, that's the only option. Then you make it work. Exactly. So if it doesn't work and understand nowadays for a poor woman, I mean, I'm not, because the pressures of life are unbelievable working. My children are working and trying to bring up children. It's not easy. There's so much pressure. So they might start bottle feeding. Now the,
00:28:22
Speaker
plastic latex nipples or the body carbonate nipples on feeding bottles are not necessarily shaped correctly. They're not the same as a human nipple and they're quite strong and they require a different type of cycling. The flow is quite high. The effort involved is very little. The flow can be so high the child will be struggling to drink.
00:28:48
Speaker
and breathe and it makes the tongue thrusting worse. It's high, it's quite a strong material and it tends to create a high vault, a high roof of the palate. Can you imagine the palate's like a church roof, a high vault would be a very arched one at the top where the rubber of the teat has made it into that shape which narrows
00:29:13
Speaker
the upper jaw, even more narrowing, significantly narrowing the upper jaw. Yeah, yeah. I've got an image here. Is that the sort of thing you're talking about there, Andre? Because we could put that on the show notes. Yes, that's absolutely right. That narrow arch where the teeth can't all fit in. And orthodontists would look at that case and immediately be wanting to extract teeth to fit all the teeth in.
00:29:38
Speaker
The whole issue of a narrow arch that we would be considering is that the tongue is wider than the arch. The tongue now can't fit in the arch. The tongue creates the wide palate. And if the tongue suddenly, because of all these factors, you might also have an allergic child because he's had the wrong start, eating the wrong food, can't breathe through the nose, becomes a mouth breather, and that creates an even narrower palate.
00:30:08
Speaker
As the palate narrows so much, the tongue now has nowhere to go, so it drops down. Right. And it doesn't, it can create what we call a class two where the upper teeth are a long way ahead of the lower teeth. Yes, yes. And that makes the lower jaw go further back. So if you can't swallow properly, you have an aberrant swallow, then there's all sorts of factors in nutrition.
00:30:33
Speaker
affected by that. Yeah. Yeah. So we see many of the patients with such narrow arches, they can be up to a centimeter too narrow. And they're the ones that often have extractions. So tell us about the extractions, because that then goes into another sort of spiral of issues. So what happens is they're trying to fit all the teeth in. There's a few not fitting in the arch at all, because it's a V-shaped narrow arch.
00:31:02
Speaker
and a conventional chap might look at that and decide that some teeth need to come out, and then the teeth can all be shuffled around, made to look reasonable from the front, made to look nice, but in a restricted arch, and which the tongue can't fit in. The stability of that arch, orthodontically, is not so good, because the tongue will create stability, if it can get in there, but if it can't, because it's wider than the arch,
00:31:30
Speaker
then the problems continue. And is this an economic thing? Is it just much easier to extract a couple of teeth and then try to align the rest of the remaining teeth as opposed to doing race work? It's partly economic and it's partly historical but as orthodontics started that was considered to rigor the thing to do was to extract teeth because it was a simple solution when you look at
00:31:57
Speaker
plaster models on the table, you think, oh, well, those teeth, too many, move them and shovel them around. That would be nice. But the whole idea is for health and holistic thinking would be, where's the tongue going? How are we going to get a good swallow? How are we going to achieve stability? If the mandible goes back, the lower jaw goes back, the airways compromised.
Breathing and Developmental Health
00:32:20
Speaker
If the airways compromised,
00:32:22
Speaker
you'll often find the child has disordered breathing. So it might just be snoring, it might be sleep apnea.
00:32:29
Speaker
And if we don't have correct breathing, if we have mouth breathing, because of the nasal breathing is far more efficient at filtering and protecting the lungs from the air and pre-warming the lungs, the air as it before it hits the lungs and it's a much more efficient method and moisturizing it than mouth breathing, because of the mouth breathing that can create an open mouth. Now if the lips aren't together,
00:32:58
Speaker
the arch will get narrower and the crowding will become worse because of the mouth breathing, the jaw will drop down and the mandible would usually go back.
00:33:09
Speaker
and the health of the person will reduce. So this this mouth breathing of course then leads onto another cascade of physiological challenges for the individual quite frequently because it's sending them into this kind of fight-flight state and this jumpy mind ADHD type mind so that's I assume you see a lot of patience with those kinds of what's really intriguing is that
00:33:32
Speaker
TMD patients have a much higher ratio of ADHD and OCD than the general population. Very much higher. And the link to that is quite significant. What's really intriguing to me is the fact that the upper jaw, if it's narrow, is also the floor of the orbit of the eye. And it also attaches to the sphenoid bone in the back.
00:33:58
Speaker
by the palatine bones and the pterygoid plates. So if the jaw is narrow on the upper, then there's an effect on the eyes and there's a lot of
00:34:11
Speaker
eye problems in the West. A lot of people needing glasses. And what you sometimes see when you look at someone with a very narrow upper arch is a very deep pooling under the eyes. Yes. Venus pooling. So where the veins are not draining very well from the upper jaw. So it'll look as though you've got bags under your eyes or it'll look as though you haven't slept for a month. Yes. And yet you have.
00:34:36
Speaker
If you look at the whites of the eyes of those patients, the white part, the sclera will often be very blue, where the veins are also not draining from the eyeball. And the narrow arch will create issues with the airway of the nose for breathing. And so the nose might be blocked, there might be deviation of the septum. We've already found that from the birthing process deviations of the upper jaw are quite common.
00:35:06
Speaker
And then therefore the airways congested. So now we're really into adenoids enlarging with the inflammatory response. The tonsils enlarging and often that's also part of the allergic syndrome because if you look at the patient, the gut
00:35:26
Speaker
has not got the correct flora either. And the whole thing is a spiral. It's very fascinating because health versus illness is multifactorial. And I find that if you can expand the upper jaw, which we as orthodontists can, we can really develop the jaw with soft light forces, applied light forces.
00:35:51
Speaker
using gentle pressure on their neck, so you can widen it and widen it almost to its genetic potential. You can eliminate those dark patches under the eyes. You can improve the complexion of the eye.
00:36:06
Speaker
it can improve the airway by simply widening the nostrils and supporting the upper jaw, which supports the upper lip and giving a very attractive appearance. Once the upper jaw is widened to the correct diameter and width, then the teeth will usually all fall into place. But it's worth mentioning, it's definitely worth mentioning, that in the West we don't really have room for our wisdom teeth as well.
00:36:36
Speaker
Now, the form with function is the byword, as you know. And if you're a baby that's been suckled correctly,
00:36:45
Speaker
in a primitive country, you'll be starting to eat hard foods quite early. You'll also be walking very quickly. There are no buggies. I saw one buggy in Madagascar. I was there for three weeks. Kids walk. There are no nappies. They're potty trained very early. They work very young. They start working the children in, where I was, age three. It's astounding. I've never seen anything quite so much, even in Ethiopia.
00:37:16
Speaker
So the children are upright, they're carrying things on their head, their posture is amazing. If you can balance a pail of water on your head and walk to and fro from the river to your house.
00:37:27
Speaker
then you will have usually elegant posture. Extreme, but they can do it. And they are barefoot, so they don't have dropped arches like we do in their feet. So their posture is usually amazing. They're tall, they're elegant, they're proud.
00:37:47
Speaker
and they're working as we were designed to work. I go there, we're all carrying rucksacks and they're all carrying our rucksacks if they're helping us get them onto something on their head. We don't have the neck musculature for it and we all have a lot of neck problems in the West and that's worth keeping the osteopaths. So I find that intriguing.
00:38:11
Speaker
They have the right physique, they eat hard food. So here we come on to problem number X. So the diets in primitive countries is much harder. They don't have moolinexes and blenders and gerber baby foods. They have to have what their adults eat. And they can be chewing on leathery old built-on dry meat, dry food, food that isn't soft.
00:38:40
Speaker
And they developed, because of that, wide arches. It does go with eating a harder diet. The research on arch size with diet is fascinating because they've done a lot of it. They've done it on primates, they've done it on guinea pigs, they've done it on monkeys, they've done it on pigs, they've done it on mice. And what they've found is that the softer the diet, the smaller the jaw.
00:39:05
Speaker
Yes, yes, okay. And if eventually you'll create just a liquid diet, they will not develop a lower jaw. Really? Some animals like mice. So was that, was Western Aid Price's work really the forerunner of this research you're describing, or was there work before Western Aid Price? Western Price was right on the button. Yeah, okay. And I'd like to do a modern Western Price, and in fact I've been in talks with the BBC tentatively on doing a programme on comparing
Primitive vs. Western Health Comparisons
00:39:34
Speaker
the health of a primitive country's children to our Western children. What we would look at would be say posture, body mass index, strength. We look at the maxilla, the upper jaw, the lower jaw. We look at their arches on their feet, their pelvic alignment, the whole
00:39:55
Speaker
health in terms of their gut and their strength and also their mindfulness and their mental health. Yes. In my understanding and watching people in these faraway places. In Ethiopia I looked at 100 children.
00:40:14
Speaker
And I didn't find one narrow arch. I didn't find plaque. I didn't find any cavities. I saw healthy upright children with full arches on the feet. No one had dropped arches in perfect posture. And if I'd gone there to run a business, there would be no business. And I just found it fascinating. Now, if I looked at a hundred children in England, I might find one that was right.
00:40:40
Speaker
at the parameters of what we consider correct. So I think the Western way of life, the head down, looking at the computers, looking at the iPad, slumped over a desk, sitting at a desk hours of the day doing school and then watching television four hours a day is average. It's crazy.
00:41:03
Speaker
and the children are not getting out, that we are developing a lot of forward head posture, which then exacerbates the problem of the jaw. Yes, because essentially as the head moves forwards, the musculature that would normally, I guess, be somewhat lax in letting the jaw move forwards is now sort of held on tension and pulling the jaw back, is that right? Yes, and the airway is compromised.
00:41:29
Speaker
and they have to hyperflex the head up to actually breathe properly. Yes, yes. So it all sounds doom and gloom and extinction. It does, it does. Prediction, but it is. And I think we need to look at where we should be and come from and where we're going. And we can walk into it wide open, we can have the mobile phone stuck on our face and we can look at
00:41:55
Speaker
computers forever in a day, but the patients with TMD that suffer the most are people who do IT. Do you know what? I was reading a paper earlier today that's just been submitted to the Journal of Body Work and Movement Therapies, who I write for.
00:42:10
Speaker
probably shouldn't say too much about it because because it's not published yet but but essentially it was it was looking at cell phone use yeah and activity of the muscles of mastication and trapezius and essentially finding there's a direct correlation the more you use your cell phone the more they work the more uh kind of sensitized they are you know and facilitated like an absolute believer because you can feel it heating up your head it's got to have some
00:42:35
Speaker
some effect. If you talk on it too long, you can feel your head soft. But that's another story. So we're on to a very narrow maxilla's conventional treatment of teeth out. We're on to a lot of injury. Injuries are very common cause of jaw problems.
00:42:56
Speaker
because a whiplash, any whiplash, can create the head back. Yes. The research is showing that about 45% of whiplashes get a jaw drop. Right, right, yeah. It clicks the jaw open, it makes the jaw open in a slam open too much and can tear ligaments and can cause problems. Yes. And because of the multi-factorial nature of what causes a narrow jaw, we can't pin the blame on anyone or anything.
00:43:23
Speaker
We can say the orthodontist didn't help by taking our teeth and creating a straight smile but in a narrow arch because the narrow arch was there in the first place. Yeah, that reminds me of that phrase about knowing about the tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth.
00:43:43
Speaker
you are focused on the teeth you are doing that and you're doing a good job yes teeth look great and everyone's happy but when you get older this is the correlation between the jaw joint problems and the teeth are quite interesting because if you have the brace work it's usually done about age 12 13 or 14 yeah but the lower jaw has a little growth path of its own and doesn't stop growing hmm until about 25 yeah I remember this yeah
00:44:08
Speaker
and it has a big spurt of growth from 18 to 25. Is that in both sexes? Yes. Is it? More in men than girls. It's called a post-pubertal growth spurt. Right. And it's approximately six millimetres for growth. So you know when you know the little boy next door and then next time you see him he's like 18, he's grown into a man. It's usually a subtle for growth of a mandible that makes him look more manly. Yes, yes. And the same with women. Yeah.
00:44:37
Speaker
when the mandible grows swardic, the entrapment can become more obvious. The condyle, the head of the lower jaw, it's called the condyle, the head of the lower jaw, might have had to grow backwards because the lower jaw was fenced in near the narrow of the jaw. And so between 1825, the mandible, the lower jaw might grow back a little bit more than it could or should into that rather delicate space behind the lower jaw and can compress
00:45:05
Speaker
the tissues there and the nerve, and that's why things like the dystonias don't usually start till about then, or the headaches don't start till about then. And so therefore there's not a link between orthodontics. Yeah, I see. On the internet people are making the link much easier now because information is on there. Yeah, for sure. I like it in the vax, anti-vax.
00:45:33
Speaker
literature on the internet, some of it's flawed, but some of it's not. And it's the same with the information about the Georgia, but the patients are getting a lot more cute and a lot more aware. And I'm actually all for that. I think you should read everything. All the pluses and all the minuses. You should re-book the conventional guys, like the government says. We should all have the MMR. There's lots of people who say we shouldn't.
00:45:58
Speaker
You can't rubbish the anti-vax people, it's all fake news. Once you start doing that, you're starting to become a bit like...
00:46:07
Speaker
President Trump. Yes, exactly. We had Dr. Sherry Tempenny on one of the earlier podcasts. Again, for that reason, because I wanted to understand what she had to say and what her views were. Obviously, she's anti-vax. But actually, some of her views aren't as polarised as you might think. She was giving examples of times where vaccination could be very beneficial.
00:46:33
Speaker
But in general, she's quite anti-vaccination. But yeah, I'd be interested to interview someone who's very pro-vaccination and get the balance. Because I'm very anti-vaccination. Because I have a child that was damaged by vaccination. And I've also been an expert witness in an anti-vaccine trial. So I know a lot about vaccines. But it's another story. So I feel that the assault
00:47:03
Speaker
on our children from birth. So if we go back to the birth, we've got the child, the poor child is conceived by parents who are not healthy. It's maybe not got the healthiest sperm to set it going, or egg.
00:47:18
Speaker
It's born in a very tight, constricted canal when the patient's, the mother's, lying down non-vertically. It's exposed to the wrong environment as it comes out of the birth canal, based on the Lord Candida. It's exposed to a very toxic world when it comes out. The world's full of
00:47:40
Speaker
insecticides, pesticides, herbicides and you know carbon emissions and pollutants on a believable scale. Unbelievable scale, sadly.
00:47:51
Speaker
we all think it's normal. You just have to see the smog in a city to realize the first breath is the child taker, full of those particulates. So then the child's brought up, it's breastfed, maybe incorrectly, it's getting a time thrust, it's made to put on milk, it's dark, creating allergens, and then it's vaccinated, a healthy child that's vaccinated.
00:48:17
Speaker
It's fine if it all goes well if the child can cope with the antigenic shock. But if it can't, then there are side effects to medicines. The Committee of Safety and Medicines, who publish yellow cards for doctors and dentists, we can access those. They show all the adverse reactions. We cannot say it doesn't cause adverse reactions. We all know it does. But if your child just happens to be the one that gets the adverse reaction,
00:48:44
Speaker
then you've injected into your healthy gorgeous bouncy baby something that's made it ill when it didn't necessarily need it. So it's a hard call to call and my three children made their own choice. I didn't want to influence them on that but they've all chosen the non-vaccine. But against a lot of opposition from the medical profession that supported them in the child's development. So then the child's growing up and eating
00:49:14
Speaker
Does this link? I know this is a slight segue but some of the issues that have been well documented as having potential impact on the child's health from vaccination
00:49:30
Speaker
is the mercury that's within certain vaccines and also the aluminium that's within the vaccines. And in fact, more so in the last five or 10 years, the aluminium seems to be coming under the spotlight even more than the mercury did. But there's a link there, obviously, with teeth and with amalgam fillings and this kind of thing. Yes. The bigger ingredient, I wish they'd called it mercury preservative, but they call it names like pharma resol. That's right. As a preservative.
00:49:59
Speaker
If you make a vaccine, it'll algae and that will grow in it unless you put something that's bacteria static in there. So what kills bacteria is mercury. But we think it's cool to put it in the mouth, in teeth, and I don't believe that is the right way to do it because mercury is proven to be released from mercury bones. And the vapor is toxic. If we have waste mercury from the dental practice removed,
00:50:29
Speaker
they have to come in special suits to take it away. It's a hazardous substance. It can't be thrown away. It can't be put into the rivers. And it can't be thrown away in general rubbish because it's toxic. And yet, we've just taken it out of someone's mouth, which is slightly odd. But we know that it releases mercury vapour. It's a lot of research to show that.
00:50:53
Speaker
And the mercury vapor tends to collect in the brain and kidneys. Yes. And there was some lovely research to show that. So when the mercury is in the brain and kidneys, it has an effect on the tubules, the neurons in the brain.
00:51:07
Speaker
and it can have an effect on the beta tubulin, which is basically the sheath that surrounds the axons and dendrites in the brain, the little nerve cells. And it's like the insulation of an electric cable. And if the mercury gets involved, it can make it come off. Basically the beta tubulin combines with mercury, and then what's left is just the nerve and it can
00:51:33
Speaker
In research that I've seen on snail neurons and axons, if you actually put some mercury in with them, they wrap up in tangle just like spaghetti would mixed up. It's quite fascinating.
00:51:50
Speaker
I don't think if we've got alternatives we should be using that. Do you remember I referred my sister to ZU because she had essentially been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis actually. I'm not sure if they made the diagnosis by the time she saw you or whether that came afterwards.
00:52:07
Speaker
But she had been getting visual symptoms and it had come after a hygienist appointment where they had cleaned her mercury amalgam fillings. She'd been given or advised to get a sonic toothbrush and she'd been cleaning away on these amalgam fillings for three months. And then she started to develop this, I'm not sure if it's a good timer is the right term, but a part of the field of vision that was missing essentially.
00:52:34
Speaker
You know, I sort of made the connection with the potential for there to be damage from the mercury. And I suggest that she get in touch with you. She came in to see you. You removed her feelings for her. And the neurologist, because you have optic neuritis, the diagnosis from the MRI scan. And, you know, as soon as I heard that, I thought that's not good, because I know that's often the precursor to multiple sclerosis.
00:53:01
Speaker
Anyway, so she saw the neurologist, she said, well look, I can't diagnose you with multiple sclerosis because you only have one episode. So it's technically a singular sclerosis, but when it comes back again, then you have multiple sclerosis. That was his explanation to her. And that was about five years ago.
00:53:17
Speaker
And it hasn't come back. And, you know, obviously, I guess we won't know until either it does or it doesn't. But that was five years ago now. And, you know, one of the things I've seen, one of the figures I've seen is that mercury levels are on average seven times higher in multiple sclerosis patients than they are in the general population. So, you know, you combine that kind of information, of course, that's just the one n equals one number.
00:53:42
Speaker
or experiment or whatever, but when that's your system, that's good. I didn't get the follow-up. I didn't realise, but I just don't believe we need it. It's an extra load. Some people can cope with toxins more than others. And I think why have we got autism on such a level? What they've found is if they put autism patients here,
00:54:07
Speaker
the mercury excretion of them is the same or lower than normal population. But what they found is if they put them in a Faraday cage where there's no electromagnetic stimulation on them, they release more. And there's a lot of castigating of
00:54:32
Speaker
the research done to show the link between it. But there's commercial pressures and government pressures. And so the truth is not quite as clear as it seems. So I think people have a right to look up and talk at the school case. Can you explain the Faraday case and just a touch more? Because I'm not sure I've quite put my head around that. So autistic children.
00:54:55
Speaker
Does it block electromagnetic fields? All electromagnetic fields, even the Earth's electromagnetic field. And then they found that the kids with autism released far more mercury than an average truck. Whereas it seemed that the electromagnetic radiation was somehow holding it in them. Fascinating to me. I think we'll find out more in years to come. Yeah, of course.
00:55:24
Speaker
know the whole story. But I'd love to come back in a hundred years and go, what have you found out? Yes, exactly. I once had a patient who had had her entire
00:55:36
Speaker
mouth filled supposedly prophylactically with amalgam fillings by some dentist down in Bristol and she she was up this way and she said yeah when I was in my 20s this guy said I should just have the whole lot done because I've got a family history of cavities and it would save me a lot of dental work in the future I couldn't I couldn't believe it but is that a practice you've heard of? Yeah I've seen it. Basically before we had fissures saving we hadn't got bonding to the day
00:56:03
Speaker
What the dentist would have done is drill tiny little runways in the fissures of the teeth, like fissure sealing with my crew. I think it was a bit rad.
00:56:15
Speaker
you'll conceive, but a lot of what I did in my early days, which I've been practicing over 40 years, I now consider wrong. So we think we know what's right now, 40 years when you reflect back on it, what is right. And that's why you can't be dogmatic about what's the cause of that. You can't be dogmatic about the vaccines, although there is research.
00:56:41
Speaker
to suggest there can be issues with them. So I think as a patient, it's a bit of a minefield as a punter out there in the wide world. What do I do? What's best for my child? So in my work, mainly I'm working on widening the magzilla, not just in terms of width, but making sure the front teeth go more forwards to allow freedom for the mandible. I'm freeing the victim.
00:57:09
Speaker
the mandible. Exactly. By tackling the devil. And having a lot of success with that. That's why I've not retired just yet. Right, right. Excellent. How do you do that? That's bracework primarily? Yes, using light wire forces in the upper inside that is so you put in and apply it slightly wider than they are. Yes. And this gentle pressure just pushes the teeth. What kind of pressures are we talking about? Like 300
00:57:37
Speaker
grams. And the forces are very less. And the forces actually encourage the bone to grow with the teeth, to move with the teeth. We don't just tilt the teeth, like a lot of people suggest we do. We actually can widen the palate a centimetre. I've done many cases where I've widened a centimetre. And if you just tilted the teeth, they'd be on their sides.
00:58:06
Speaker
And does the tongue change its function as a result? Yes, we have to train them to tongue swallow properly. So there's a lot of myology involved, tongue training exercises to learn how to swallow correctly. Once the swallow is correct and once the tongue can fit into the palate, a lot of things
00:58:23
Speaker
just unravel. We have a lot more stability because I've got a lot of long-term results, where 10 years later we've still got the white palette. Because even the British Orthodontic Society, the orthodontist body of Britain, say that we should have retention, retainers, plastic retainers, for life. So that implies that it's not going to be stable. Well, it isn't.
00:58:50
Speaker
What is stable? It's a hard one. The most stable results I've seen are where the palate's wide and the tongue fits in there and the patient's got their lips together and breathes through their nose. There's an old dentist who's now retired, John Mu, and he was very much
00:59:10
Speaker
of the opinion that it should be. We should start with making sure the kids of the children have their lips together. And his devices that he used to develop the upper arch were also made the child have to keep their teeth together and their lips together so they would nose breathe. And by nose breathing, nasal breathing, the arch would develop much better. Now, his devices are quite hard to
00:59:39
Speaker
get used to, not everyone wants them, but I don't use them. But I've seen long-term results of his 30, 40 years post his work and the results are astounding. Now he's been criticized by profession. And I always find when people who are doing wonderful work, they often are exposed to being criticized.
01:00:09
Speaker
I don't use his technique, but I have seen a lot of the work where you get the lips together, you start nose breathing, you do not mouth breathe at any cost. You can develop nice wide arches very easily on a very stable
01:00:24
Speaker
And isn't it, I remember you telling me a figure about, I've forgotten the name of the chap in Sydney who did research into the modelling agencies there and he found, was it? Yes, it was Derek Mahoney and he did a lot of research with models. He found that nearly all the models have not had teeth out. Yes, yes. And they have wide arches and pallets. So there's an aesthetic side to it. Aesthetic side to it anyway. And also the lips, the pout of the lip.
01:00:52
Speaker
If you want pouty lips and to look like a Greek goddess or an Egyptian lady with a beautiful lip with an upper lip profile matching your nose, then you need all the teeth in there. Right, right, okay. And ideally it would be lovely to get the wisdoms in and quite a lot of my patients have.
01:01:13
Speaker
But I think it's false to say you're a non-extraction dentist because a lot of patients still need the wisdom teeth out. And that's just how it is. So I think you can't say I've done a wonderful orthodontic job and then five years later they go and say, well, I've done my wisdom teeth now. There's no room for that.
01:01:40
Speaker
Sure, sure. So I know we've mentioned Weston Price and actually the paper that I showed you the image from just earlier in the discussion. This is a guy called Jerome Rose and Richard Robley. But what I found interesting about this paper is that I think it was out, let's see what year it was, 2009. But it seemed to have very similar information to what Weston Price was showing 100 years previously, more or less.
01:02:08
Speaker
And I think that's absolutely fantastic because we like to keep thinking we're very modern. And yet there's people in the past who've done research on a very same topic and we're wrong to think that it's outdated and it's not blinded and researched and clinical trials and it's not randomised. We should be looking at it.
01:02:32
Speaker
invited a very famous speaker, the inventor of fixed braces, to talk to us at a study group. He was in his 80s. Bob Ricketts, his name was. He was sort of godfather of orthodontics. And he gave his talk about the work they were doing in the 50s on the jaw joint. He says, it's all lost, but we keep
01:02:54
Speaker
reinventing it and starting to do it again. And he says they're critical of old work because it may not be randomised, you know clinically gold standard to our modern standard. But the work's still there and it was very interesting.
01:03:10
Speaker
the fact that we're losing, I mean, Western Price's work is old but there's other people doing it and I would love to do it myself if I were retired and someone would fund me. Yes, exactly. And if the BBC, if I can get them actually interested in that to do it, if there's any of your listeners that are programme broadcasters, it would be so interesting. It would be a fascinating programme. It would be unbelievable. It would be show-stopping because
01:03:39
Speaker
we would realize how ill our children are. We'd realize how unhappy they are. We'd realize how stressed they are. We'd realize how fat they are. We'd realize how unfit they are and how poor their posture is and how poor their dentition is and their swallowing and their airway and their breathing. And we would start to think maybe
01:04:06
Speaker
that we've got it wrong. Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely. And the thing is, is that all of those things you just mentioned, it's quite a long list, but they're all so interactive, aren't they? That, you know, when you have poor posture, for example, then that will impact on jaw function, but also poor jaw function will impact on posture. But then we also know that if you've got poor posture, that impacts on emotions, but so do emotions impact on posture and, you know, the loops just are,
01:04:33
Speaker
round and round and round and all we need to do, this is an example, I called the podcast FC2O which is From Chaos to Order and so what I'm trying to do is speak to people that have essentially been in the field where they've really achieved a level of mastery in that field and what almost always emerges at the end of that rainbow if you like is this simplicity that
Returning to Basic Health Practices
01:05:01
Speaker
you know, emerges from the complexity. And really what it seems to boil down to, as you've just explained, is breastfeeding, you know, eating healthily, having healthy parents, healthy nutrition, natural foods. It's really quite simple things in many ways, but we're quite far removed from it. We're so far removed from it. I know Paul checks a book, and I have another book,
01:05:26
Speaker
Paul Czech's book, Eat, Moon would be healthy. It's the Moon bit. And there is no such thing as healthy food. It's just eating, you know, in the right proportion. Natural food, yes. It's not some food that's really unhealthy, unless you're looking at a poisonous food. So I feel that, you know, we've got a nation where a third of women over 30 are on antidepressants, or some hideous figure who are spending billions on it.
01:05:53
Speaker
Why is it so depressing living in England? Why are we all so stressed? Why are we all getting so obese? And we all are, as a nation, generally. And I find it very disturbing because I think we're building a problem for the future. Yes, yes, for sure. Big problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think we need to reflect back. Definitely, definitely. Now, we haven't mentioned Pauschinger's cats and I think
01:06:20
Speaker
perhaps with good reason, because I know Price and Postinger had a lot of close affiliations, and Postinger had found, somewhat controversially, a number of different things with his cats, but when he fed them foods they weren't evolved to eat, then they had dentition issues that their mid-face again seemed to be the area which really shrunk in size.
01:06:42
Speaker
And I think even though there's been some, you know, recent critiques of his work showing that I think it's taurine that cats need and gets denatured by cooking foods. So that was why they had these growth deformities. Nevertheless, it kind of still shows that when you are not getting the foods or sufficient foods to meet your nutritional requirements, then it seems like for some reason it's this middle third of the face that gets affected.
01:07:10
Speaker
I find that work really fascinating. Manly fascinatingly was a dentist. All those years ago, and he'd bred these cats for five or six generations. They were notified of cats, so they were sterile from birth, so they weren't affected by the environment. He split them into two groups. One group was a controller, a healthy food, and one group wasn't. But the issues with each generation of cats
01:07:34
Speaker
they were getting illeronella on the western diet, getting more flu, getting more birth defects, feline flu, cat flu and allergies and then
01:07:46
Speaker
they were not producing and I don't think there was a fifth generation. That's right, that's right. And I think we as humans, we're on the third to fourth generation of Pottington's cats. That's how I look at it and I look at it as well. I look at global extinctions, you know, we've got the extinction party there, you know, a bit like the passenger pigeon that
01:08:09
Speaker
you know, bred into the super minions, and a few years later it was all gone. So what is happening to humanity is a little bit worrying. Yes, definitely. I wonder if I've been interested in just recently, and I know we've got to round off soon, so I wanted to just get this in before we finish.
01:08:30
Speaker
I've been reading a bit around central sensitization and the idea that of course there's many different things that can cause sensitization of the nervous system and this sensitization essentially for people that haven't heard of it is where you know it's very commonly talked about in low back pain and you know someone can have perhaps quite a minor injury in their low back but it can persist and persist and persist and even then the scans show there's nothing wrong with the back anymore and yet they're still with this persistent pain.
01:08:59
Speaker
And often that's because the nervous system is sensitized. And so the research that's been done on this, what's often called central sensitization, because it's sensitization of the central nervous system, shows that TMJ dysfunction is a very common cause of that. Now have you seen much of that yourself? I know probably in a roundabout way you have. In a roundabout way I have. Sensitization is
01:09:22
Speaker
It's where the nerves will keep firing, even though the stimulus is gone. Exactly. And that's like phantom leg injuries where you've had your leg chopped up and you can still feel it. And it's a really big issue. And after you've put the mandible, the lower joint, to the right place and the arch and decompress, you can still have a lot of the symptoms which won't go away. Because once the rhythm's set to fire, they won't unfire.
01:09:52
Speaker
Yes. And I think it's a big problem. The other issue that clouds a lot of what we do is some of these issues are set.
01:10:01
Speaker
by drugs, drug injuries. So psychotropic drugs and antidepressants, a number of them can cause dyskinesias. It's called target dyskinesia. So it means body movement disorders or symptoms that are permanent caused by the drug. And they can mimic TMD or
01:10:33
Speaker
And there's a whole host of people affected by it. There's also a whole group of people who have been affected by Botox and Botulin poisoning, which has affected their brains and central nervous systems.
01:10:50
Speaker
because it is very toxic in some people. It's like the bell curve, you get the people who cope with things in the normal, you get the extremely successful ones and you always get someone at the base that something's not gone right. So I have patients
01:11:06
Speaker
who were very worried about Botox poisoning and obstetric patient groups. There's a lot of them in those. There's a couple of questions I have for you though. One is that I remember you talking about China types. I think you call them China types or maybe glass types, but it was like they're crystal. Crystal, crystal. There you go. I knew we'd get that. Crystal. And so these sound like
01:11:27
Speaker
Because I remember you saying that to me maybe 20 years ago and and me obviously getting a feel for what you're talking about, but Having read around central sensitization. It seems like those are exactly the people you're probably referring to when you said crystal type. So these people Will be an example. They you know, it's the slightest thing could trip them up and yes, they could come into your surgery and
01:11:50
Speaker
It's too cold. It's too hot. The fount's blowing on me too much. The lights are too bright. And they're the princess and the pea types. Now, I ask patients whether they think they're a crystal, a delicate type, princess and the pea, a plastic that someone in the middle mends with the flow, or a steel. Steel people, they don't feel anything. They can have a deranged jaw joint, not feel a thing.
01:12:18
Speaker
They can have a cut leg. I'm a bit of a steal myself and I don't even see it. Notice I've got a cut leg or I've got a fracture. So you had a few injuries yourself when your timing falls. Yes, I broke my front tooth just a few weeks ago in Madagascar and I had to have it pulled out. And it was extracted in a very primitive setup with that and aesthetic and it was fine. I didn't really
01:12:42
Speaker
feel it too bad at all. But there was no numbing. But some people, this would just be life-changing. It would be terrible. I took over that. So if you are a crystal person, then I think you are more hypersense-sized. Does it relate to health in general, would you say? I mean, I think salt types are generally not quite as healthy as the steel types. I always say so. They usually have very poor muscle type.
01:13:08
Speaker
When you palpate the muscles, they're very weak. They don't feel as though they're there. And I'm not sure their nutrition is very healthy. And they're often very needy and vulnerable.
01:13:22
Speaker
and they have other issues. So the other thing that I was triggered to think of when you're talking about the Botox is that of course some of those muscles that are being injected with Botox, particularly around the face and
01:13:40
Speaker
cranial areas are still involved in TMJ function to a greater or lesser degree, I imagine, or is that? Yes, they're used by neurologists and maximally patient. Sort of paralyzed the muscles, clenching, chewing, and they're used in the dystonia patients.
01:13:57
Speaker
because that means one dystonia is where the neck may twist round. It means one of the muscles in the neck is firing and the other is not. So it's rotated your head, but you can't get it back. So those patients, they can't even look forward, they can't walk, they can't work.
01:14:13
Speaker
right and they're very sad so they have Botox in the muscle that's contracted to try and straighten yourself but eventually the Botox doesn't work okay and eventually they get sensitized Botox so they need different types of Botox but it's it's not like getting to the cause of the problem yeah yeah which is what I think fundamentally you and I want to be considering exactly exactly yeah a healthy future for our grandchildren's children yes yes exactly yeah
01:14:42
Speaker
And that kind of takes it beyond the individual, isn't it? So this idea of a biopsychosocial approach is that, of course, you want to help the individual and their biology that's in front of you and their psychology. But that psychology and biology also extends out to their social group. And what we're talking about here is the impacts of things like TMD on the social group, but also how societal norms impact on the functioning of the individual.
01:15:10
Speaker
and how that can lead on to this whole cascade of issues that we see. The spiral of despair. Because if you look at my cases, it's nearly 60% of them have considered suicide. Because there's a question mark on my question mark. I didn't know it was that high. I knew it was an issue. It's an issue with people who have got chronic illness.
01:15:34
Speaker
And that makes it, we realise it's the severity of it. Yes, for sure. But I think if we want to make a healthy nation, you know...
01:15:43
Speaker
people at Extinction in Berlin, I don't agree with closing down London, but I think that we do need to start seriously stopping the pollutants and taking a look at, say, mobile phone use and not just going, it's a necessity and being much stricter with our children and not letting them have iPads when they're very young and not letting them sit gormlessly in front of the television and letting them out into the free world, you know, too.
01:16:12
Speaker
run in the forest and give them some freedom and some scope and not be so paranoid about their safety. So that risk averse society, which I see now, has come to such a degree that, you know, even as a risk averse, you know, they want to detour the surface as soon as the kids sneeze, as soon as you come to the toilet they want a chemical air pressure to re, you know,
01:16:39
Speaker
pollute the house and it's become obsessional. I think a number of times people wash and chemicals that we're exposing ourselves to on a considerable daily basis. The average woman is exposed to over 300 industrial chemicals in one day, using her makeup's foundations, removers, body sprays. That's a figure I read and they absorb.
01:17:05
Speaker
five pounds weight in chemicals a year from their products that they use on their face. And you just think, oh no, we need to start reflecting on everything. All of us. And that's to me what Holism is about holistic care. You've got the handle on it. You've come in with a time on foot to keep your arches strong. Yes, the five fingers. You've kept your body in good health. And that's what we've got to do.
01:17:35
Speaker
temple. God has only given us one body. We have only one body that is a little temple. We do need to look after our own. I look at people who are not
01:17:47
Speaker
I look at a lot of people out there and I think, I feel sorry, I feel sad, it's emotional problems. There are a lot of issues that are making people unhealthy. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. So I wonder, before we finish off, I know that there are lots of people that will work with the TMJ, lots of dentists that work with TMJ, but what would you say if people are out there looking for a TMJ specialist,
TMJ Treatment Process
01:18:12
Speaker
that sort of a similar kind of standards or holds their standards as high as you do. What should they be looking for? What should they be asking for?
01:18:23
Speaker
looking maybe on our website. Yes. Which is Duraic.com. Yes. It's not tricky. Yes. Duraic.com. I think I was lucky to get that one. Yeah. The British Society of the Study of Cranio-Mandibular Disorders has got people like yourself, not still past chiropractors, physical therapists who also have an interest in the cranio-mandibular system. Yes. Cranio meaning the head and mandibular, the jaw. They're two separate bones, but they're all part of the skull and the head.
01:18:52
Speaker
And there's a list of practitioners who are, but very few are doing it. It's very, very few. I see patients from all over Europe. And yesterday I had someone from Finland and another lady from Spain. Well, this is nuts coming to me for their braces every four weeks. I mean, that's the global footprint in itself. But the fact is there aren't enough people doing it.
01:19:20
Speaker
And one of the problems is the restriction of the regulators and conventional teaching. It doesn't want people to be looking outside the box. And I think outside the box is where the interest is. Yes, exactly. I tell my students when I'm teaching about the TMJ of a patient of mine who actually referred to you and she decides to go with a different dentist who is a lot cheaper.
01:19:48
Speaker
And part of the reason they were cheaper was they weren't using dynamic MRI scans and some of the other methodologies that you used. And unfortunately she had quite a bad experience and she was suicidal because I believe her disc got pinched, got caught through the brace work and she was in extreme pain for several months. And so I just say that this is why people like Andre use quite high tech facilities to make sure that you're doing everything you can to do things in the right direction as it were.
01:20:18
Speaker
So is that something people should just be a little aware of as well or is that difficult? I think you've got to do it thoroughly. You want a correct diagnosis and to me a correct diagnosis is using gold standard x-rays and MRI and other tests.
01:20:35
Speaker
electromyography so that you're actually looking at the muscle tone of all the muscles and the current firing and numerous other tests that we do because you want to make an accurate diagnosis and then the patient who has the problem really understands what the problem is. They can actually visually see, they understand all the words, they know what they've got, they can decide whether they want to deal with
01:20:55
Speaker
that I've just put up with that. And what would the, I know it's a variable duration, but it's not a short duration thing typically, is it? To treat them is about two and a half years, because if you can't expand a magzilla very quickly, the arch won't widen more than one millimeter a month, and then you've got to line up all the teeth, and then you've got to line up, move the lojo, or let the lojo come forward.
01:21:24
Speaker
But I find that as a practitioner, I find the ones that don't work where maybe they're sensitized, maybe it was drug and juice. I find that's what I go home and remember. I don't remember all the good cases. All the people that praise me or buy me wonderful presents or just thank me.
01:21:46
Speaker
follow me from then on. I always remember the ones where it hasn't worked because I want 100%. But in medicine, nothing's 100%. If it was, we'd have the eureka moment. So as a practitioner who cares, I find it very
01:22:04
Speaker
and settling to me if I can't win them all. Yes, exactly. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time today. That's been fantastic. I know we could have carried on talking for a lot longer, but you have to run off to an appointment. Maybe we'll do another one down the line. Now, people, obviously, you mentioned the general website, jawate.com, but where can people actually find you if they want to contact you for an appointment?
01:22:28
Speaker
If they look up Andre Hedger on the internet, if they look up excellence in Dentistry limited, we're there and we're in great looking. Excellent, sorry. Fantastic, well thank you very much Andre. Pleasure. Appreciate your time and your expertise and thank you for helping us to make a bit of order from the chaos. Thank you, it was a real pleasure talking to you. Excellent, brilliant.
01:23:22
Speaker
So there's a bit of an overview of the work of Andre Hedger as a leading holistic dentist and TMJ specialist. Andre's description of his observation of patients who he classifies as crystal types fits almost perfectly into the cutting-edge research in central sensitivity which is where my current research interest is and is the core topic of my upcoming seminars and workshops.
01:23:44
Speaker
It's also why TMJ screening is such a key component of the check system that I teach in practice, and you can hear Paul Chek talk about his interest in TMJ on our earlier podcast, the first one with Paul, podcast number five. If you know anyone who'd benefit from the topics we covered, please do share it. All contact details and other information discussed can be found on the show notes at mattewaldon.com.
01:24:11
Speaker
Thank you for joining us. I look forward to seeing you on the next show.