Protecting Your Heart and Smile with Dr. Ellie Campbell

We know how important our smile is. Right? Our smile tells us how we feel, what our energy is like and how we perceive people. We perceive them by their smile. Are they smiling at us? But our, our mouth is so much more than a smile. Did you know the mouth and our oral health is a key indicator of our cardiovascular health. I'm bringing on a longtime friend today and a prior girlfriend doctor show guest who is also, you know, just one of really. She is one of the most amazing women, most intelligent women and educator. And you guys are going to want to get out a pen, piece of paper and start taking notes because we're going to share a lot with you in very tangible ways as well as actionable steps. Yes, our oral health is tied into our cardiovascular health. And today, Dr. Ellie Campbell, who is a board certified in family medicine and has been for over 30 years with multiple certifications. She's a well known author and presenter, one of the highest rated presenters in the medical space and for lay audiences. So she is a integrated physician. She's been in functional medicine, has expertise in age management medicine, but she is an expert in cardiovascular risk reduction. Cardiovascular risk reduction. And that's this is key and it is tied into our oral health. And we're going to share with you some tidbits of how important this is as well as what we can do right now. You can start doing today that's going to decrease your risk for heart disease. So let me introduce her and bring her on. Welcome, Ellie, to the girlfriend doctor show. Good to see you, my friend.

Good to see you my friend. You look wonderful. Happy March.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, no, we are recording in March and it is beautiful out here in Dallas, Texas now. It looks beautiful behind you too. In Atlanta, Georgia.

We have. Spring has sprung in Atlanta for sure.

Well, I love it. Talk about. You are well known in family medicine, an advocate for vitamin D and you know, hormonal balance and an expert in this field holding your own concierge medical practice, one of the first concierge medical practice in, in the United States and talk about that journey into oral health in your journey.

Oh, absolutely. So for 13 years I practiced very conventional medicine. I worked in a community health center. I followed the best evidence based guidelines and over that decade and a bit more I watched myself write more and more and more prescriptions and I watched my patients not really get much better. In fact, I saw obesity rate rates increasing, I saw depression rates increasing. I saw cardiovascular disease remain the number one killer in our country even though we were prescribing fistfuls of prescriptions for our patients. And so my compounding pharmacist invited me to a seminar, and I learned the fundamentals of looking at physiology instead of pharmacology, looking all those things we learned in medical school about anatomy and physiology and putting them in the context of the patient, not just looking for a diagnosis so I could write a prescription for a disease. And that changed my world. And I started practicing functional medicine after that journey. So I got pretty good at it. And fundamentals of wellness became the cornerstone of treatment management for pretty much every condition, right? We have to eat clean food and drink clean water and exercise most days of the week and get good sleep, and so spend time with girlfriends and spend time in nature. And these are fundamentals of wellness. But my patients were still not achieving full health, and they continued to have strokes and heart attacks. And one patient in particular was very dear to me. I helped her daughter, who had an infertility problem, get pregnant. So I got to bring that baby grandbaby into the world and made me very close with this family. And d had hypertension, but we treated it. And she had high cholesterol, but we treated it. And one day her daughter called me and said, mom didn't show up for work today. She was the matriarch of her family, and she worked in the family business. And daughter ran over to the house to go see what happened. And mom had slumped on the floor next to her computer, and she'd had a massive stroke, and she was paralyzed on one side. And I felt like I'd been gut punched because I was following the best evidence based guidelines, and I was treating all the things that we could treat. But something was missed because she still had an event, she still kept her sense of humor. And she went into the hospital. We have a stroke center near us, and she did very well in the hospital. They moved her over to the rehab facility, and a very rare complication happened. It happens in about maybe 5 or 7% of strokes. And that blood vessel that had been damaged burst, and it caused a brain hemorrhage. And she died from a brain hemorrhage. And I felt responsible. I felt our health care system was responsible for her death because we missed something. And so I spent the next five years of my career searching for the things that I might have missed. And it turned out that two weeks before she died, Dee had a toothache. She went to the dentist and she had this toothache treated. But what I didn't know then and that I know now is that certain oral bacteria that live in the bottom of those tooth roots, when a tooth becomes infected, can get in the bloodstream and act like little needles that puncture the arteries and cause plaque to rupture. And that can be the triggering event for a heart attack or a stroke. And so, following that journey, I've now spent the last five years of my career understanding everything that I can learn about the myriad ways that the mouth is connected to the rest of our body. Because besides periodontal bacteria and endodontal bacteria, we have a nitric oxide connection, we have oral airway connection, we have tongue anatomy and mouth shape. All of these things affect our systemic health. And if we are not partnering our dentists, our hygienists, and our medical doctors together, we are going to miss one of the major triggers to the number one killer in our country, and that's oral health. So now it's my mission to teach everybody that I can about these connections, because I think too many people believe that cardiovascular disease is their destiny. Their mother died from a heart attack, their father died from a heart attack. Their grandfather had a stroke. That's just the way they're going to go. And they don't think they have any control over that. But the exact opposite is true. Heart attacks are optional, strokes are stoppable, and dialysis is not your destiny if you get to the root cause of all the underlying triggers and are willing to do the work to correct them.

Well, let's look at the. Consider teeth meridian charts.

I mean, yes.

Ancient history, right?

Yeah. This is traditional Chinese medicine, dental meridians. So if we think about the human body like an electrical circuit, and we know that when you walk into your bedroom, you flip the switch on the wall, but the light over the bed goes on. You touch the wall, but it had an impact somewhere else because the electrical current is connecting those two things. Well, our body runs off of electricity. If it didn't, we couldn't catch an ekg, we couldn't do an EEG for seizure activity. Our bodies are electrical, and this electrical circuit runs through our mouth and our teeth. And each one of these teeth maps to a specific organ or tissue distant in the body from where those teeth lie. And from a cardiovascular prevention viewpoint, the most important ones are the third molars, or the wisdom teeth, but that overlaps a little bit to the teeth right in front of it. Teeth number 15, 18, 2 and, and 31. These are the second molars. There's some overlap in the. In those. Electricity. It's not a defined line, but what this means is that when you have a problem in your wisdom tooth and you go, the dentist may be taking care of it or maybe thinking that it's not a problem when the problem is with your heart, but it's caused by a tooth, and the dentist didn't make the connection. And this is where De's problem was. It was way back in that last molar, right before her wisdom tooth. That's the tooth that she had worked on a week, two weeks before she died.

So you have your wisdom tooth teeth removed.

Yeah. So if you have your wisdom teeth removed, you still have the energetic connection of the gums and the tissue and the bone where that tooth used to live. I have an interesting case of a patient who has no known cardiovascular risk factors. She is not overweight. She doesn't smoke. She eats a very organic, clean and healthy diet. She exercises every day. Her cholesterol is normal. And I was doing her annual screening because I screen my patients for these inflammation and cardiovascular vascular markers. And her pro BNP was elevated. This is a hormone that indicates the earliest signs of heart failure. The heart muscle is being stretched and strained and. And so I asked her about her wisdom teeth, and she said, I had those out 30 years ago. They can't be the problem. And I said, well, energetically, I'm seeing stress on your heart. Can you please ask your dentist to take a really careful look at that place on your mouth? And she said, well, they did an X ray and there's a dark spot on my wisdom tooth socket. But they said, it's been there for years and it doesn't seem to be a problem. And I said, well, it's not a problem to your jaw maybe, but I think it's a problem to your heart. Let's get a second opinion. The second opinion dentist looked at this X ray, said the same thing. It's an asymptomatic dark spot and not causing any trouble. So I then sent her to a third dentist who I happen to know is trained in biological dentistry, and he did a cone beam CAT scan and said, this looks like an abscess. The bone looks inflamed around the edges of this dark spot, and I think you may have an abscess. So he numbed her up and took a scalpel and cut into perfectly healthy gum tissue, and out came a bunch of pus and broken spicules of bone. He had to scrape and scrape and scrape to get all the infection out of that wisdom tooth socket from 30 years ago that had no nerve in it and had no pain, so she didn't feel it. But once that got cleaned up and she healed, over the next six months, her levels came down and down and down, back to normal again.

That is such a good story. And you think about this and have. I've just gone through a bunch of X rays for my teeth and I'd had a bunch of teeth pulled, wisdom teeth, eight teeth pulled, you know, whatever number these teeth are over here for braces, you know, because it was that your mouth is too small for all your teeth. And I had significant overbite in the past. And so, you know, all these teeth pulled root canals, looked at and had them pull those teeth too. And. But just think about, you know, everything that's going on in our mouth and how that was so connecting. And when you talk about the. The test Pro bnp, how can our audience get that ordered?

So it's just a Quest LabCorp test. It's called NT N Terminal Pro BNP, which stands for Brain Natural Peptide. And it's a. It's not common, but it's easily and readily available. I think you can order it through Quest on their website. You don't even have to have a doctor's order. You can just request it. There's a partner test that goes with it called Galectin 3. So ProbNP and Galectin 3 are two tests that are very interestingly elevated not only in heart trouble, but after digging through the literature, I've also found they're both quite elevated in patients with advanced periodontal disease. So we find that connection again from the heart to the mouth in, in these blood tests. So when I, as a cardiovascular prevention specialist was ordering this test, I thought I was looking for heart trouble, but it turns out I often identify dental trouble.

That is crazy that they're so connected. You know, in obstetrics, we're taught oral health is critical to decrease risk of miscarriages, preeclampsia and these stillborn babies.

Yes.

And that this oral health component is a huge component. We don't want to do too much when someone's pregnant. We don't want to release infection into their body. But so this is, I mean, I mean, that's, that's critical. The connection with heart health, however, that's relatively new, except when you go back to Oriental medicine and they're like, oh, yeah, this is.

We've known about this for only 10,000 years.

Yeah, yeah, we've known these connections for this long. And so, you know, let's talk about the dental Procedures that are very, very common, like cavities being filled, cavities in general, and root canals. Now, we had a great discussion with Bristol Health people that do the oral microbiome testing and looking for levels of infection or pathogenic bacteria and what that looks like. And there's certainly limitations, but that may be a useful place to start.

It's a great place to start. And I do want to make it clear that really we have three different types of bacterial colonies that will live in our mouth that affect our. Our dental health. Caries disease, or cavities has one set of bacteria. Periodontal disease or gum disease is a second set of bacteria. And root canal disease, root canal infections, or apical abscesses have yet a third set of bacteria. So we think about. We know that our microbiome is unique on different parts of our body. But it's interesting, I think, that we have at least three kinds of microbiomes, and probably a fourth if you count the tongue, because different bacteria live differently in those areas. A fun fact to share at your next cocktail party is that cavities are contagious, that they're caused by an oral bacteria, usually strep mutans, but others as well. And sugar doesn't cause cavities, Acid causes cavities, but sugar is the favorite fuel of these bacteria that when they digest the sugar, turn it into acid, and then that acid begins to digest your teeth, causing those holes. There's a new kit on the block for treating cavities which I think is very exciting. It's called SDF or silver diamine fluoride. And every mama needs to know about sdf, because if we can catch a cavity early, we can paint this silver diamine fluoride. And yes, it's fluoride. And I know there's controversy about using fluoride, but we're talking about trying to save a tooth. And when we wanted to, we can paint the silver diamine fluoride. It's an antibiotic, and it binds permanently to the surface of the tooth, and then it kills the cavity bacteria, prevents it from getting any worse. So we can prevent the drilling and filling. No anesthetic is needed. And it can save teeth from that drilling and filling, because we always have to undercut the tooth and make the filling size larger than the cavity was to begin with in order to make the filling stick. So we want to save as much tooth structure as possible. And SDF can be a miracle for that, especially for very young children who are have their baby teeth. We don't want to have to drill and fill them and put them through all that trauma if not necessary. And also for our elderly in the nursing home, they often suffer terrible dental hygiene and all the consequences that come from their poor diet that they're fed in the nursing home. They have a rampant cavities problem in their remaining teeth in the nursing home. And SDF can be a beautiful saving thing for that for them.

And pretty low risk, right?

I mean extremely low risk. You know, we, we can mitigate the risk a little bit of fluoride if we make sure that we're eating our sea vegetables and getting some iodine in our diet. So that can mitigate a lot of the risk of taking fluoride.

Yeah. And so cavities related predominantly to strep mutants, but others and, and bristle bacteria.

Bristles is a home spit test, does not have to be ordered by a doctor. You can go online and order one for yourself and they will tell you if you have a low percentage of these cavity causing bacteria in your mouth so that you can take steps to change it. Be careful though. Please do not use over the counter mouthwashes like Listerine. They're like napalm on the inside of your mouth and they will kill and take away the bad bacteria, but also, and more importantly, they'll take away the good bacteria. And we must have those good bacteria. They act like soldiers to keep the bad bacteria away. And you don't want to kill the good ones. It'll make the bad problem worse.

But wait, weren't we told Listerine, you know, use Listerine, get good oral health, decrease your cavities. And what was that based on?

Yeah, it was based on Listerine. Science is what it was based on. Right. They're out to sell a product and yes, it does kill the bad stuff and that's what they were basing all of their evidence on. But it also kills the good stuff. And little known fact is that when you kill the good stuff, you can raise your blood pressure by 5 to 10 points. So there's definite evidence showing the use of chlorhexidine and other antiseptic mouthwashes can lead to high blood pressure.

Interesting. That is fascinating. And so what should we be brushing our teeth with? I know I've got some favorites.

Yeah, so you should brush your teeth with a toothpaste that you'll use. Right. And so you don't want it to taste so yucky that you're not going to use it. Some dentists say there's no need for any toothpaste at all. If you want to use baking soda and or, or coconut oil, more power to you. Personally, I think that tastes terrible and I don't like to use that on my teeth. Some people like to use charcoal powder. You have to be careful with that though because it can scratch your veneers and it can scratch your enamel on your teeth. And if you have expensive dental work, it can really shorten the lifespan of that expensive dental work. So be careful about anything that's too gritty. I happen to like dental side in is one toothpaste that I like. I like Revitin, that's another toothpaste that I like. I have about seven different toothpastes on my shelf right now. Cover all your bases including including one from Carry Free that has high dose hydroxyapatite and a little bit of fluoride in it because it does help make your teeth more slippery and keep the bacteria from sticking. So I also have a Tom's Toothpaste which I like. I also have a Jason's that I like. So I don't think good ones.

Primal Life Organics, one of my Primal.

Life organics has a nice one Dental side in.

I like them too. And again, like you, you said one that you will use or these rotate through some good ones. I occasionally brush my teeth with the charcoal powder as well. Just keep that, keep the mouth detoxed. And I had done the Bristol Health Oral Health. I might have to go back and look at my results again and retest. But it was, it was just interesting. I have to look to see what, which bacteria are associated with the heart, the heart disease.

So yeah, so there's, there's five. We call them the red complex bacteria and they have long names. Porphyromonas gingivalis is one, Treponema denticola is another. So AAPGTDTF and fn, Fusobacterium nucleatum. So you know, long, long names, we call them by their initials. But those five bacteria are the ugliest ones because especially if you have more than one, they gang up and they live in biofilm in your mouth. And they work together to make inflammatory cytokines and digestive enzymes such as myeloperoxidase that, that literally melt the gum tissue. So that gives them a good opportunity. Porphyromonas gingivalis is unique because it lives off of blood. So it chews up blood as a fuel supply. So in order to get blood it has to make bleeding gums. So it makes enzymes to melt Your gums and get them bloody so that it has a better fuel source to grow and divide and make more of itself.

And bleeding then are never normal. Bleeding gums are never normal.

Bleeding gums are never normal. If there's pink in the Sink, it's a 911 dental emergency. You need to get to your dentist and say, please help me with this. Bleeding gums are never normal. And so they should have a. The best dentists in the country should have a periodontal care program that is targeted based on those mouth bacteria. They should be testing those bacteria because if you don't know what you're treating, it's really hard to eradicate it. And fun fact, some of the worst cases of periodontal disease have a yeast overgrowth problem. And if your dentist is not checking to see if you have yeast in addition to bacteria, then they're going to miss it. And it's going to be very hard for us to ever get your periodontal disease under control.

And the yeast are eating are, you know, fueled by sugar as well.

Sugar. So sugar is the bane of the American diet. And if we all learned to give up sugar in our diet, we would see cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke, cancer, Alzheimer's, autoimmune diseases, plummet.

Yeah. And don't drink our sugar, that's for sure.

Right.

Sweet tea. We're in, you know, from the south, the sweet tea is so common.

Sweet tea.

Sweet tea. And Ellie, with this, you know, information, when someone is told by their dentist they need a root canal because they're having that dental pain, what would you advise?

Yeah. So in my opinion, and this is a well educated opinion, but others will disagree with me, all root canals are temporary. So you may wish to buy yourself some time by doing a root canal. However, what your dentist is doing is killing the tooth and leaving a piece of dead tissue in your mouth. Fortunately, it's a very vascular space and the gum tissue surrounding it will keep that tooth in place. And cosmetically, you may not even be able to tell that you've ever had a problem. You'll usually have a crown on top of that tooth after it's had a root canal. But a hundred percent of the time, there are critters living in that tooth root that they just cleared out and put this material up in to occupy the root canal where the nerve and blood supply used to be. 100% of the time there's bacteria there. How problematic are those bacteria going to be? Is entirely dependent on the strength of your immune system. While your immune system is strong. If you're 25 years old and you have a root canal, it's probably going to be fine for five or seven or 10 or 30 years. One day it's going to go bad on you. If you're 75 years old and you decide that you want to have a root canal, it might not ever become a problem because you might outlive your root canal. But for most of the rest of us, where the problem is going to be manifested is not going to be in your mouth. It's going to be on that organ that the dental meridian chart showed us is going to be affected. So since most of those root canals happen in the back teeth, the organs that are at risk are the thyroid and the breast. And in some cases, in some clinical studies we've seen, up to 100% of breast cancer patients have had a root canal on their second molars.

Wow. Wow. That's crazy comparison. That's a crazy number. 100%.

100% in some studies. Right. Others show not so much connection. But I think that your dentist is pause is doing the best job they can to, for the lowest possible cost because the alternative is to get the tooth pulled and then to have a root, an implant done. And so when you have a dental abscess, because so you had a toothache, that's why you went to the dentist in the first place. They say you need a the root canal. We have to be really, really careful after we pull that tooth to ensure that there is no infection in the space remaining. Because if you put an implant up in a tooth space in the gum where there's infection lying. I had a root canal tooth pulled and I sent it to the lab for a forensic analysis. I just wanted to see what was growing there. And I had 18 different bacteria and an amoeba growing, growing in my root canal tooth. It was massively infected. Yeah, it was massively infected. Right. It had been there for 20 years and it wasn't causing me any trouble until I decided to have silver amalgam filling removed from the tooth behind it. And when they did the anesthetic and numbed up that tooth, it stirred up the root of the root canal tooth and all those bacteria that had been living there for 20 years made an abscess and a toothache. And so that's why I had to have that root canal tooth pulled. I decided at the time not to have an implant done. And I'm really glad that I did because there was so much infection. So fast forward a couple years Later. I'm considering now having the implant placed, but I'm doing some, some dental work. And I had the same orthodontic experience that you did. Our, our orthodontist must have trained in the same place because I had four teeth pulled and got put in headgear. Right. So I had to wear that lovely headgear that pulled my overbite backwards. In doing so, they removed 15 millimeters of space, a centimeter and a half of space for my tongue and for my airway, guaranteeing that I would have sleep apnea because there's not enough room for my tongue in my mouth as a result. Once after childbirth and you know, the mommy weight gain issue added to my sleep apnea problem. And I had a sleep study and it showed that I had sleep apnea. I went to a dental sleep medicine specialist instead of a medical sleep medicine specialist. My dental sleep specialist said, this is the problem you have. Your airway is too small. They created a problem. But I can give you back at least half of that space if we put you in a dental appliance every night. So it's going to be sort of like braces that you put in and take out. Except I can't do it if you have an implant because that implant won't move. So you have to wait till after you're done with this program. And I'm pretty close to being done. But the really cool thing is I don't snore anymore and I don't have sleep apnea anymore. And I like my little device that I wear in my mouth at night because I wear a Oura ring and I have 98 oxygen almost all night, every night.

And it's me used to have.

Yeah, it would drop into the 80s while I slept. So. Yeah. So for me it's a big deal, right?

Yeah. We can talk about this forever. Let's talk about some tangible steps that everyone listening can take. So, yes, a few of the things that we mentioned was certainly just oral hygiene. What does that mean exactly?

Oral hygiene. Right.

Kiss someone with cavities.

Cavities don't kiss them with cavities. You can help protect yourself if you've got. If you just have to kiss someone with cavities, that you brush your teeth right away, that you use an oral probiotic. I happen to like Probiora Stella Life has a new one out. And these are nice oral probiotics. When you brush your teeth, if you're going to use a fluoride toothpaste, you only need a pea sized Amount, that long strip of toothpaste that goes across all the bristles is only for toothpaste commercials. It's not for people. And if you swallow that and you're a child, they want you to call poison control. So we want to be very careful about fluoride toothpastes. So we need to brush our teeth. We need to use a water pick like device, a high pressure water pick that will be. You will be shocked how much junk and corruption comes out from between your tooth spaces after you've brushed your teeth. When you use a water pick and use a tongue scraper to get those mouth bacteria, those bad bacteria off the base of your tongue that will freshen your breath and decrease the colony counts of the bad bacteria. So your friendly bacteria can take over. Another really important thing is mouth ph matters. And so if you're sipping on acids all day long, you're going to drop your mouth ph and it makes it much easier to get cavities and grow bad bacteria. What are acid things that people drink? Coffee, apple juice. And many, many bottled waters, including Tasani, has a very acid ph. So you think you're doing a good job sipping off of bottled water, but you really need it to be more alkaline or. So if you're a bottled water fan, go online and check the ph. It should never be below 6 in anything that you're drinking.

Oh, but if you filter for your house and get, you know, stainless cups and glass bottles and, and fill up. I got this new. I'm addicted. When you come here to Dallas to visit me, Ellie, you'll see I've got this new zip water which instantly has a filter, huge filtration system, but also instant hot water, instant, instant cold water and instant sparkling water. So I'm just sparkling water. I just love it. And Ava, when we got it, she's like, oh, instant hot chocolate with her hot water. I thought that was so funny. But you know, he thinks that like the, those little things that make your life easier. But water filtration for your house. Water filtration, absolutely.

Because if you don't filter your water, your kidneys have to. And we don't need to put that stress on those little kidney beans. They are working so hard.

So also, if you have cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, any systemic illness, you need to look in the mouth. And how do you find a good biologic dentist or someone who's trained. They don't necessarily have to be certified biologic dentist, but is minded in that way.

Correct. So there's a couple of places that I would say your listeners can go to. The first is AOSH, the American Academy for Oral and Systemic Health. Aosh.org and they have a map Find a practitioner to see if you can find a dentist in your area. Robin Openshaw has created she's the Green Smoothie Girl, and she has a holistic dentist finder. She spent hundreds of hours assembling this list online of dentists and the things that they do. Do they do careful mercury removal? Do they do ozone therapy? That's another thing. If you have to have a root canal, you can often sterilize it, at least temporarily with ozone shots. So some of ozone injections directly into the the gum area, they use novocaine first.

And so say that I did do that. My dentist here in Dallas at Flourish Dental, we did ozone injections before I had the root canal teeth removed.

Yes. And that's what I wish that I had known from my patient D. Because if she had done ozone injections to calm that infection down before they surgically manipulated it, we might have been able to prevent the release of the bacteria into her bloodstream that triggered her event.

Oh, my goodness. Okay. So much good information. Tell our audience how they can connect with you more on a higher level and where to, where to find you, where to meet you, et cetera. Yeah.

So I'm on campbellfamilymedicine.com my practice is in suburban Atlanta. I have a tiny little concierge medical practice, meaning we don't accept any insurance. Patients pay a monthly membership fee to hold their slot. And whether they see us or whether they don't, they pay the same monthly membership fee. And we try to be available pretty close to 24,7 for their health care needs. And prevention is my jam. So I really am interested in people who have risks for cardiovascular disease, heart attack or stroke, or have already had one and are motivated to make whatever changes they need to make to not ever have another one. Because I really do believe that heart attacks are optional and strokes are stoppable. There's a huge algorithm we dive into to look at all the root causes, not just the oral systemic ones. Then they are a huge contributor, but also the genetic causes, the dietary causes, the lifestyle causes, smoking and exercise and diet, and on and on and on. So we have a long checklist of things that we go through one by one by one to make sure that we eliminate all the things. And since I've started following an oral systemic based practice, we have had zero heart attacks or strokes in any of the patients who follow the program. So it's really awesome. It really has brought back my passion for practicing health care because as a physician, you know, you want to help your patients stay healthy and if they're dropping from the number one killer in our country, we've missed something. And now I believe I know the answers. And so I'm very passionate to try to teach others of play. And the place to start is in your dental chair.

Yeah, yeah. And it's a, you know, it's a complex, right? Because it is those foundationals, those fundamentals, eating right. For me, it's the keto green lifestyle and whey eliminating sugar, Giving your body a time for its intelligent design to do its work. And always asking questions like trusting your intuition if you have a, you know, problem somewhere. Let's look. Look back to the meridians. Look back to the oral meridians. Is there something going on? There could be going on. And same in my practice, you know, where I had client, a client specifically. I remember a very high performing client and CEO who, she suffered a mental breakdown about three months after mercury fillings were removed. And oh, wow, that trigger was certainly a responsible co factor in that event. And so looking even from mental health, cardiovascular health, and looking at these, the toxins within our mouth and cleaning those up and keeping those clean for ourselves and our family. All right, Dr. Ellie Campbell, you guys, Campbell family, familymedicine.com and also gonna do my quick rapid fire questions at the girlfriend doctor. In the girlfriend doctor community, we have four key pillars, and that is nourish, shine, awaken and embrace. So with nourish, what is your favorite food? What food lights you up?

Oh, my goodness. I would say avocado.

Oh, my goodness. Okay.

I, I can't get enough of them. My second favorite is potatoes because you could do so many things with them.

Oh my goodness. I love it. I was just thinking avocado. It's so easy. That's one of my often a part of my lunch. Periodically I'll just cut one open, pour olive oil, salt and pepper on it, maybe some za'. Atar. And I just eat it with a spoon, right? I eat it with a spoon. I love it. All right.

I use everything but the bagel seasoning.

And I know you've recently celebrated a birthday or, or I did.

I turned 62.

62. And what for shine? What keeps you looking so young and sleepy? Radiant Sleep. You need sleep.

It's my best health strategy. I sleep seven to eight hours every night.

Good, good, good, good. And I can't believe you're 62, my friend. We've known each other. Ava just turned 15. So we've known each other since Ava was a couple months old. Yeah, we've known each other. And so awaken. What are you reading at your bedside?

Breath by James Nestor. It's oral Systemic health about the role of the airway in. In health.

Interesting. Okay. And then embrace. You've been married for how many years? What do you.

28.

Yeah, 28 years.

You've been married be 29 in June. Yeah.

And I think you, you know, maybe fair to say your relationship's closer now than it was.

Certainly. You know, Myrtle was a patient of mine, and I said, myrtle, how do you possibly stay happily married for 54 years? And she said, oh, honey, all 54 of them ain't happy. She goes, you just got to know that that same sorry sob you can't stand to be in the same room, let alone the same bed with one year becomes your best friend and confidant the next year. And you got to learn to roll with it and hang, hang till the end. And I think that that's some of the best marital advice I ever got because all marriages will do that. And yes, it's better now, now that we're empty nesters. Better than it's been.

Oh, you remind me of what Ms. Rose said. She came in for her GYN, her annual. On her 50th wedding anniversary, and I was like, 50 years at that time. I was married 10. I'm like, how can, how can you do this? She goes, sugar, there are good years and bad years, good years and bad years. And I think that's powerful. I, I didn't make it past 15 in my marriage, but again, I've learned so much about, you know, about relationships.

About relationships and yourself and, and, and your creator. And it's just all, it's all together. You can't, you can't have a successful couple relationship if it's not a threesome.

That's right. With God in between. So thank you so much, Dr. Ellie Campbell, for being on the Girlfriend Doctor Show. As usual, you are a wealth of knowledge for our audience. Please share this episode, share this widely and far and, and tell everyone what you just learned. Make those notes. But more importantly, take one, at least one action step from today's interview and incorporate it into your life. I've got that water pick at my sink side. I just have to use it. So that is my action step that I'm definitely going to pay more attention to. And as well as you go through your journey and you're looking at how you can nourish yourself, one thing is we're in community together. There's no judgment. If you've had procedures done, dental procedures done, there's no going back. It's only recognizing and going forward. And keep looking for answers, get second third opinions and really work with someone who has your back. Really can help you and guide you. And again, you're getting this knowledge here, feeling empowered and I appreciate you. You guys, wherever you listen to podcast, do me a favor, go right now and review, please. You love this. Give me a review. Your 5 star reviews matter in our rankings so that we can reach more people. Till next time. God bless you.