The most fundamental principle in a biologic approach to dental care is that each of us has a unique biologic response to the materials we find in our lives. Most of us do well with whole wheat bread, but some of us have a very bad reaction to it.How can biological dentist help? First and foremost by paying attention to your health and your history of health issues. If it looks like reactivity to materials might be a problem, we can test to find what materials you are probably allergic to and which ones you probably are not. Depending on your health status it might be appropriate to remove and replace all the materials you are allergic to. Sometimes it might be more appropriate to restore only the newly involved teeth with biologically safe materials.
Clifford Materials Reactivity Testing is helping dentists determine your unique reactive profile. They test for 90 or so reactive compounds and report on over 9800 dental materials. Over the years of seeing their reports, its clear which materials are most likely to cause reactivity. That includes anything with mercury, nickel, beryllium, and some other metals. Dental practice has been mercury-free for decades.
Another area of concern for the biological dentist is root canal therapy. Most of the time root canals are performed so that you can live with a tooth that no longer has living tissue in it, i.e., a dead tooth. Dead teeth can harbor bacteria and toxins that can cause an infection, either chronic or acute. Infections cause a drain on one’s immune system and can cause problems far from their original site.
Traditional root canal therapy removes the bacteria in a gross way but leaves thousands of tiny micro-tubes in the root open. Some researchers and most biological dentists think that is a problem.The problem can surely be solved by removing the tooth. But this approach causes other problems. If you don’t get it replaced, you lose chewing power, and your remaining teeth shift. If you do get it replaced it might mean having to use metal for an implant, or affecting adjacent teeth by placing a bridge.EndoCal system is such an alternative approach that is a more biologically sound root canal procedure.
