Let's
take a look at the seven principles culled from this transcript...
NUTRITION Understanding
the role nutrition plays in your good or bad oral health is at the top
of the list. We know that for healthy gums, you need Vitamin C in
your diet. We know that for healthy and strong teeth, we need
Calcium and Phosphorus in the diet. According to Adelle Davis,
the 'nutrition guru' back in my day, the nutrition intake needed to be
balanced. In other words, loading up on tons of Vitamin C alone
could create or manifest a deficiency in other vitamins, or the
apparency thereof - you need a balance for it all to work properly and
not cause problems someplace else. It is not my place to tell you
how to eat properly, where to derive your nutritional benefits or how
to ... anything else, nutritionally. This is an area the
individual must make a study of and decide for oneself what will work
best for him or her. The overall purpose is to strengthen and
keep strong the autoimmune system. Why? The autoimmune
system is the body's first and best defense against the big bad world
out there. That includes chemical toxins, cancers, oral
pathogens, etc. This is why someone with a good immune system may
have a better set of teeth and gums while maintaing a poorer hygiene
regimine than someone who goes through all the hygiene motions
dilligently day after day and still has problems do to dental caries or
periodontal disease. Am I saying that nutrition is all we need to
be concerned about? No. It is an important 'factor'.
FRAME OF REFERENCE
I suppose there are many ways to say this; 'frame of reference', 'point
of view', etc. The point is, Dr. Nara wants us to take a new and
different look at the dental profession and it's role in our
lives. The profession is built on the mechanics of the repair of
teeth and gums, basically. While there are new advances taking
place all of the time, they primarily deal with treating the symptoms
of the process of decay - whether above or below the gumline.
That's about it. Dentists train to treat symptoms. Some
specialize and treat periodontal or endodontic problems - but nobody
cures your bad teeth. All of the measures taken by dentists
simply REPAIR damage done by decay. There are not many, if you
can find them, who will sit down with you after an exam and tell you
how to go home, change your diet, spend more time on your teeth, gums,
irrigate to help shrink a periodontal pocket and so on. the
hygienist is more prone to give you that talk, but they are so busy
cramming patients in that they hardly have time. The bottom line
is that you have to take a good look at the profession and their
motives - and you have to take a serious look at your own hygiene
practices and decide that you will have to take responsibility for your
OWN oral health (which ultimately affects your overall health), and
stop putting it on the profession or your dental insurance plan to do
it for you - because they won't.
OPTIONS
What are yours? Well, if you already have a mouthful of decayed
teeth and gums, you might want to go to the repairman first and right
away and get them fixed. It's like having a broken leg and
drinking mega-doses of minerals every day in hopes of it healing
itself. Well, it might, but you'd be better off getting to the
doctor and letting him or her set the leg and put a cast on it - then
make sure you don't do the thing(s) that caused the broken
leg. Take a look at your other options. In respect to your
oral health, you have options open to you; you could brush longer and
sooner after eating, you could actually floss, you could irrigate, you
could actually change your diet, you could cut out sugars, quit
smoking, cut back on the carbs... You could DECIDE to make these
changes to create the desired effect of a 'healthy oral
environment. One of the options you have is how much of the next
stuff you want to get your hands on...
KNOWLEDGE
You'll need to know WHAT you are going to do, HOW you are going to do
it, WHY you are going to do it and so on. If you research
anything long enough, you'll be able to tell very quickly which
information is valuable, which is fact, which is opinion, which is
proven, etc. Pretty soon common sense kicks in. This sounds
like a lot of work, but if you spent a few less hours
a week on some reality TV show and spent that time on your own reality
show, it'll pay off - plus, you'll be the one in charge of kicking off
the players, in the form of erroneous information, habits,
professionals... You may come to the conclusion, "Hey, if I just
do these few extra steps each day, not only will I save my teeth, I
could prevent diabetes or heart disease!" Many of us wait until
we are stricken with some disease before we pay attention.
Probably most of us are guilty of that and probably because of the
conviction in our early years that we will live forever and ailments
like grandma had are really too far off to be concerned with right
now. Truth is, 'right now' is when it is happening, we just
didn't feel the pain connected with it or notice the blood until it is
very late in the game - then we scramble for the answers! Most of
the folks visiting the OraMedia site come looking for an alternative or
a quick fix for a root canal, because they finally heard those words
from the dentist. So be it. Maybe it's too late, maybe
not. Logic tells you, however, that just because you didn't save
one tooth, doesn't mean you can't dig in and save the rest! Logic
also tells you that you'd BETTER dig in and save the rest.
UNDERSTANDING THE
BIOLOGIC BALANCE When you know what is happening in your
mouth, when you know if you've got little bacterial critters in there,
which ones they are, how you got them and how you get rid of them it is
almost a psycholigical survival sense which kicks in telling you to do
the right thing! Now an average person has around 500 species of
bugs in the mouth and 50-75 of them aren't the kind you want in
there. You understand that they exist on a 'biofilm' in different
areas of the mouth - normally the areas that are condusive to their
survival, the dark anaerobic areas you keep missing with your brush,
areas you can't reach, areas you don't floss... Well, somehow all
that food and sugar drink gets to them just fine and they thrive, they
produce acid waste as a by-product rot the area and get on with
life. That's their job to survive! It's your job to counter
their survival or suffer the consequences; bad teeth, loose teeth, a
mouth full of amalgam or other composites, sore, bleeding gums, foul
breath, unbearable pain, lousy fitting caps, bridges, sore, sutured
gums, yanked teeth and no teeth. Sorry, it wasn't hereditary, but
it IS easy to blame something else for our ignorance.
TAKE ACTION
This is where the dental profession say we all screw up. If fact,
if we were to really do this, they say, well they wouldn't need to
drill our teeth, lop off our crowns and fill them with gutta percha,
cut open our gums in order to scrape our roots... or the hundreds of
other procedures they have come up with to fix our teeth. I think
they're right - in part. I think they are right that we do not
take action, but I don't feel that they really want us to either!
I think they like it just as it is. Hopefully you don't.
Hopefully, you care enough to take a little action to save your
teeth. Hopefully, you don't think it's no big deal if you
don't. No one will take care of you like you. I'm sure you
don't think the dentist lies in bed at night wondering how you are
doing on your brushing and flossing... so JUST DO IT. It's
kind of like working out. You know that you are not going to have
rock hard abs tomorrow morning, if you are just starting out, but if
you get your attention on the realistic goal, you KNOW that you will
have a much different body in a year if you keep at it. And so it
is with your teeth and gums: You know what to do, now take
action. Keep your sites on a year or ten years from now when your
friends are going in for their third or fourth root canals and you
never give it a second thought...
MONEY
Unfortunately, money plays a significant
role throughout our lives. Some people learn early on how to make
a buck work for them and others never catch on - always letting it slip
through their fingers. If money is any motivation to you,
consider a lifetime of having dental work done, from the first cavity
right to the final fitting for your dentures. Dr. Nara prepared
the cost comparison chart (below) during his practice. Bear in
mind that these were 1970's dollars...
Now, we might safely say
that you could probably double that cost of $965 for practicing
OraMedics by 2004 dollars. If that is true, you might also want
to double that cost of having/not having teeth and NOT using the
methods put forth by Dr. Nara and OraMedics. I have had people
call me and tell me that the cost of certain dental work required them
to take out second mortgages on their homes. Did that dental work
cure their disease? Of course not! But the GP's, the
Perio's and the Endo's will be more than happy to take your money
nonetheless! We don't have to beat this one to death, the point
is made.
Now these are the seven factors, or principles, to good oral
health. However redundant this may seem, the point is
the group of principles. Personally, once I got a couple of these
into the puzzle, the picture became much clearer to me.
Interesting to note that if you were interested in improving your
skills at a certain job or hobby, say... building computers for
example, you might change the wording in a couple of the principles
above and insert those appropriate to your subject. They seem to
be valid for being successful in most any endeavor. That's the
bonus I was able to get out of the transcript and that is why I felt it
important enough to make available at the OraMMedia site.
As I wrote earlier, Dr. Nara is a pretty 'deep' guy and he's still very
interested in seeing people beat tooth and gum disease the easy and
affordable way - on their own. If you don't own Dr. Nara's books,
buy and read them. If you already own
them, get them back out and go over the material again. Keep
these principles in mind this time.
Success to you.
-Tom Cornwell
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