A famous writer, Maurice Meaterlinck, who wrote around the turn of the 19th century, made a statement that applies profoundly to the attitude of the medical establishment to Alternative Medicine. “Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds to guard the past.”
For decades the policy of dentistry has been that it is to be limited to the mouth and associated structures. Those of us applying alternative medicine in our dental practices are under the constant ridicule of mediocre minds, many of whom are the law makers regulating what our license allows us to do in both medicine and dentistry. While they desperately try to hold back progressive practitioners under their rule of having to be “Evidence Based” or within the “Standard of Care,” innocent victims go without possible life saving, or at least quality-of-life saving, care.
Some examples of progressive attitudes are:
• Periodontal Disease: Very often this symptom is a sign of what is going on in the rest of your body. In addition to cleaning the pockets, and dentally treating the gum disease, lifestyle and diet changes are often in order as well as a possible referral for medical testing.
• Tooth Decay: If your diet and lifestyle is rotting your teeth what else is suffering? The sugar causing the decay also causes cancer, type-two diabetes and heart disease.
• Crooked Teeth: Many times caused by inability to breathe through the nose, resulting in oral and facial muscle malfunction and growth changes. Now that we know the danger of chronic inflammation why are we allowing it to persist in the sinuses?
• TMJ Dysfunction: Ninety percent of my TMJ patients are women. Shouldn’t we be looking into hormone imbalance as a potential cause for many of the symptoms? In the past most TMJ treatment consisted of splints, physical therapy, possible medications with occasional surgery. By simply treating the TMJ dentally without a thorough diagnosis you may miss what is causing the patient to clench and grind in the first place.
• Myofacial Pain Dysfunction: Another possible hormone problem, medication side effects, as well as a manifestation of stress, can all be causes. Just treating the teeth rarely brings a cure.
• TMJ Osteoarthritis or Rheumatoid Arthritis. Again the “Standard of Care” is that these are incurable and must be treated with medications. Arthritis is a chronic inflammatory disease and can be successfully arrested with diet and lifestyle changes. Having to treat one’s mouth separately from the rest of the body is ludicrous.
As many of my readers know I recently finished a book entitled WHY? The question that could save your life. I wrote it so that the average person could understand the challenges of achieving optimal health and healthcare. Recently, the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Rothman, Schekman and Sudhof which confirmed the scientific finding outlined in the book The Code of Life, published in 2008 by Dr. Ronald Drucker. Dr. Drucker goes into the details of what makes the body work and how to make it work better.
For those of you interested in what the establishment is doing to hold back medical progress, what causes many diseases and what you can do to prevent them, I consider this a “must read.” I kept my book simple to encourage the average person to read it and live a better life.
More doctors are becoming more holistic as the truly scientific evidence, not pharmaceutically backed “doctored” research, becomes available. Many of our leading universities are also coming around. There is hope that those of us who want optimal health care will not have to look far to find this type of care giver.
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