Dr. Dwight Jennings: A Live Look at Bite Realignment & How TMJ Impedes Performance #182

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This is polyvinyl siloxane. It's a silicone epoxy that sets up in about 15 seconds. And this is much higher accuracy at figuring out how teeth come together than either carbon paper or wax or anything else. Okay. And bite on your back teeth. Stay closed. Let's see that nice end-on-end bite. Good. Open for me there.

All right.

Then we hold this up to the light and it tells us how everything's touching. This is like a pressure gauge.

You want it in front of this white wall?

Right there. And so it shows us in thousandths of an inch how everything's touching.

So we can see more light coming through parts. That's where my teeth are hitting right now. And my jaw is misaligned because I've been sleeping without the right bite guard for Yeah, so you got some outside—

so normal teeth should meet like this. Your upper tooth should hang half a tooth out over your bottom tooth, and so you should only hit peak to valley and peak to valley and not on the inclines. And so some of these were showing some inclines in the back, but we've come together pretty good in the front. We look like we're hitting just— hitting maybe just a speck heavy on your left— right front tooth, but pretty good. And let me look at the big picture. Bite closed for me there. Okay, let's see how everything's growing here. So we've grown, we're getting down pretty close there. And if you were closer and we were adjusting that night piece more often on you, those teeth would be able to grow in quicker. Okay. But you stayed quite stable there. Everything's pretty good. Just one little speck on the outside and a little speck on the front.

So Invisalign just came out with a new thing that allows you to pull teeth up to make them grow faster. I think a millimeter every 4 to 6 weeks. Have you played with that yet to force growth?

I have. I'll have to look at that. The problem with most Invisalign treatment is that they don't grow the back teeth taller. So, if you take somebody who has crooked lower front teeth and you start straightening those front teeth, it forces your jaw backwards on you unless you're putting vertical in the case. So, like, I get a number. I have a couple really severe cases. I have a 35-year-old male who developed hyperacusis and became totally disabled over Invisalign. And then I have another lady that we just started on that developed severe oromandibular dystonia. She lost her ability to talk about 6 months into Invisalign therapy.

And so what's going on there is a focus on cosmetics, not function. But I certainly know at least one guy who's using Invisalign for neuromuscular dentistry. So I think it's not that Invisalign is good or bad, it's that if you use it to just make things pretty, well, you might lose function. But if you use it to make things functional, it seems like a pretty neat tech. I was thinking of using it, I wanted to talk to you first, to help my back teeth grow because they don't grow very quickly. So basically, I don't know how exactly it works, but it's only been out for 3 months. So I'm interested. They're most likely going to be putting buttons on those teeth and they just Yeah, just keep like pulling the tooth up a little bit, and I think you can do 1 or 2 teeth at a time on each side, but the growth rate's very fast, which is kind of cool.

So teeth, it takes 5 times as much force to intrude a tooth as it does to extrude a tooth. So teeth, you can pull them up pretty easily. Oh, cool.

So I think I'm gonna do that because, I don't know if the camera can catch this, but if you look in my mouth, I have these big caps on my back teeth, but the ones next to it aren't there, so. I see that.

All right, Dave, now we're going to adjust that background.

Okay, so, so you're, you're going to grind down the high points, correct? Okay.

Yep. Uh, it's— yeah, so it's— you should either be hitting on this little ridge through here or this valley through here, but not out over. If you hit on this ridge properly, there's equal amount of light on this side and this side of that line, and this one's heavy on the outside. All right.

I also feel like my front teeth are hitting a little bit more than they used to. Like the pressure there is getting higher.

Yep.

You're going to fix that.

I'm going to fix that. Cool. Oh, Philip, is the compressor on? Let's check out these front teeth. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. So it's more on the left.

Yes.

You can feel the percussion on that tooth. You shouldn't feel percussion on those teeth.

Yeah, they need to come down or the back needs to come up.

Bite, stay closed. Tap, tap, tap again.

What a difference, wow.

Yeah.

The right side's too strong now.

Uh, stay closed. Open again. Yeah, hitting front teeth is, um, there's like 6 times as many sensors in front teeth as there are in back teeth. Tap, tap again. Still a little more on the right than the left.

Yep.

Stay closed. Put people tip to tip. Most dentists worry that it's going to cause excess wear on your front teeth, but when you build— most people have overbites, they spend all their time out here because that's where they relax too, and so they end up wearing those front teeth. When you put somebody here and get the back teeth tall enough, it protects your front teeth. You can't wear down the front teeth anymore without wearing the back teeth down too.

So where we have me now, my back teeth aren't hitting at all on my front teeth. All the pressure's on my front teeth. We're gonna fix that because it doesn't feel great right now. Now it sounds a little weird, but after you do this for a little while, you become really aware of where your teeth hit, and you can actually guide a dentist, say, "No, no, it doesn't feel right," because when your mouth is relaxed, it's kind of amazing, like your whole body relaxes.

Yeah, so main pressure on a bite should be on your back molars. So on an ideal bite, Jaw should close up, swing up, hit your back teeth, and microscopically pivot around those back teeth to get your front teeth together. Most people with bite issues, they close up, hit their front teeth, and then they have to pull their jaw back.

So right now, for my back molars to hit, I have to do this. Watch. I have to shift my jaw forward. So now my front teeth hit when I close like this, but if I do this, now my back molars hit. So I have to over-shift my low jaw.

Yep, we're gonna fix it. So we go through lots of tubes of blue goop. But— Let that set up first. Don't touch it. Good. When you put this blue goop in there, it also deprograms their brain a little bit, and so they can find the ideal bite better. It reduces your avoidance mechanisms. For shifting your bite. Mm-hmm. So drilling teeth, in my opinion, is drilling brain tissue. It has about the same importance.

I'm glad there's no hitting on the left. Now it's all on the right though, so we need to just bring the height of the front down a little bit more, I think.

So now switch back to the right side. See it?

You said drilling teeth is drilling brain tissue. Mm-hmm. That's an apt analogy. Yeah, they come out of the brain.

So the trigeminal proprioceptors, which are neurocrust derivatives, are composed of the only sensory cells in the brain.

That's the fifth cranial nerve one?

Mm-hmm.

Left side for sure. I'm starting— I can feel the left molar hit now. The right one still isn't hitting, but the front left is hitting.

Okay.

You're taking off like less than 10,000th of an inch when you do that, right? And I can totally feel the difference. It hits here, then it hits here, then it hits here. So, and when it feels right, I'll be able to tell you because I'll feel my molars hit and my front hit and not too hard.

Right, exactly.

Now the right setting. And I'm getting a little bit of back pressure now, which I want.

Right.

So it's right there.

Okay. Good.

So because my bite guard, my night guard broke, I've been having like muscle tension all up and down my back, all along my head, so, and my sleep quality isn't as good as it should be right now, so I'm I'm stoked to be fixing this. You were telling me something about when women who have a bite misalignment, if they carry children, that they get some alteration there. Can you tell me what that was again? Because we didn't get that in the podcast and it was really cool.

So women with bad bites running elevated substance P would alter the neurochemical environment in which the baby is gestated, and that would have caused a higher incidence of autism and glial activation.

Interesting.

It's gonna alter how the brain develops.

So the glial activation theory of autism, which is one of the things that we know is present in autism, we just haven't proven it's causal, but it might be.

Right.

That this is what could be triggering that.

Right.

So that means that if you're planning to get pregnant, or if you are pregnant and you have bite alignment problems, you might wanna address those. Even something as simple as like a drugstore mouth splint so you don't grind at night would be entry level. or actually going and getting it done right.

Wow. So now Substance P is a neurosecretory modulator. It blocks progesterone utilization. It'll— bite dysfunction will induce a lot of miscarriages.

Interesting, because of the Substance P connection. That I did not know. And my wife, Dr. Lana, does a lot of work with people who have miscarriages or fertility problems, and I know that she's looked at Substance P, but I don't think that we have that as part of the protocol.

So like I had one lady patient once that had an 18-year-old daughter. She's had 18 years of unprotected sex and she came up pregnant within 3 months of putting her mouthpiece in. Oh no.

I have that with Bulletproof, the Bulletproof Diet. Like people, they start taking glutathione, they go on the Bulletproof Diet and suddenly their fertility returns. I've even had a few emails like, "Damn you, Dave Asprey. Thank you, but damn you. Look what you did." They're amazed because in their 40s, suddenly fertility came back. Yeah, reducing inflammation is shocking. Alright, let's see how we're doing now.

Time to squirt again here.

The front finally stopped hitting. The back actually feels kind of even, but a little stronger on the left, but they hit about the same time.

Between biting, smiling, and watching them talk. So what should happen on an ideal bite is you should bite and talk on the same trajectory. And so most people have an overbite, but they thrust forward when they talk. They'll— So you don't like to see that. You want to get that hypermobility out of the system. You want it so that they open and close on the same arc as they talk and bite. And that's what happens when you put them end on end. Good.

Now, one of the hacks that I learned when someone has significant jaw pain is like putting a popsicle stick or toothpick on the side that's lower and then biting down gently so that the jaw just tweaks alignment. And it's amazing, if you have a strange headache or ringing of the ear and you try a toothpick on either side, but hopefully the side of your jaw that hits first, you'll actually feel a resolution of symptoms sometimes. I think even there's a connection with rosacea, as memory serves.

Yeah, so C-fibers secrete both substance P and another compound called calcitonin gene-related peptide. And calcitonin gene-related peptide is a primary factor on rosacea. Hmm. What's the other point? Substance P and calcitonin gene-related peptide are the two known causes of headaches.

Wow.

If you look at Amitrex, it tells you that it works on trigeminal sensory fibers within the pia mater around the brain, skin around the brain.

I used to have a lot of silent migraines where I wouldn't get the pain, but I would get the other effects. I'd feel it in my stomach and my brain would turn off. I was kind of a zombie. I didn't understand. Actually, fluorescent lights still— I'm much more resilient than I used to be, but fluorescent lights still mess with me after a while. There used to be nutritional things that were involved. It's gone away. I've probably taken Imitrex 5 times in my life. But man, that's a powerful drug with a lot of side effects. I've also seen a treatment which is just basically cayenne that you snort or a nasal spray, and it hurts like hell, but if you have a migraine, that also hurts like hell, and most people who have migraines I know would be glad to do a line of cayenne on a mirror with a razor blade if it would solve their problems. Maybe this is a better way, just saying.

Fine on that. So Dave's night appliance was broken, and, uh, he put some rebar in it, and then we'll re, um, work it over. He cut the wire to take any stress off the system while it, uh, while we repair it.

And would you also explain how that night appliance works when it comes back? Just so people who are watching the video, they can understand like how it keeps my jaw from falling backwards and what it's doing for me.

Sure.

It's actually kind of stressful to open your mouth that much, like hold it open and close it. Like I can feel it affecting my nervous system. Like I'm getting a little bit of the fight or flight response triggered and I'm actively turning that off using like the things you learn from doing the Inner Balance trainer. So I can feel my body's like, "All right, I've had enough stress on the jaw here." And then I feel it right here, and then I'm like, "All right, turn that off." So I'm basically fighting with my nervous system, and it's saying, "Freak out!" And I'm like, "Down, boy." The nervous system in school isn't quite right.

All the pain fibers from the trigeminal goes to the same nucleus as the pain fibers from the vagus.

So that means that when you fire your trigeminal nerve, you're firing your vagus nerve, and your vagus nerve will bleed over, goes right into your gut, right into your, into your heart, visceral organs. It's one of the reasons that, you know, we say you have a gut feeling or a broken heart.

Another major factor is, is that in acupuncture theory, the gallbladder meridian starts here and it crisscrosses back and forth through your temporalis. And so your temporalis is what controls your gallbladder Right, so, but your temporalis is what pulls your jaw back. So when the jaw's too far back, it'll cause gallbladder dysfunction.

There's masses of gallbladder dysfunction right now in people. And part of it is there's just a stagnant bile flow from a lack of fat in the diet. I actually wrote about that in the Bulletproof Diet book. Like, how do you stimulate more bile? Because you can actually detox faster. And we just figured out bile is actually a signaling molecule. It's not just there to emulsify fat. It actually has nervous system signaling effects. Kind of cool.

That's very interesting. Another squirt. This is how we typically do this. We go through a large number of little squirt tips. The other thing you might want to point out is on my website there's an area on elder care initiative. And so bite is likely a major factor in aging symptoms on elderly people, whether that's hearing loss or postural decline or endurance, gait, cognitive decline. Nobody's ever checking for bite on elderly people. That is, long-term, many decades of bite being dysfunctional would tend to make them degenerate quicker. Substance P is going to be probably one of the strongest epigenetic modulators. Good. There's no more important reason for altering genetic function than trauma.

Yeah, well, plus, if you, if you grind your teeth for 70 years, they're probably going to be a little low. So as you age, your molar, your molar height goes down. Preventing that, I consider to be one of the things you ought to do as part of a comprehensive anti-aging strategy. It just seems like there's probably some stuff we don't understand about it, but in the overall risk-reward, it's pretty heavily tipped towards reward and away from risk as far as I can tell.

And that's most likely in the Parkinson's, why the Parkinson's comes on with age.

Talk to me about erectile dysfunction and jaw alignment. If you can connect that, I'm pretty sure everyone's gonna get their jaw aligned. Is there a connection?

There's a connection. So the— So peripheral circulation is heavily influenced by your bite. That's why it makes athletes stronger, right?

So that's the whole— So better athletes could be stronger if they had better bite alignment.

And so that goes back into the— so the trigeminal mesencephalic is a paired nucleus with the locus coeruleus in the brain.

I do not know what the locus coeruleus is.

It's your sympathetic ganglion in the brain.

Oh, interesting.

It's your primary sympathetic center in the brain. And so they're right side by side, and they share a lot of information. So bite dysfunction puts you into autonomic or sympathetic.

Which reduces fertility and is probably gonna reduce performance.

And shuts down peripheral circulation.

Because you want, well actually wouldn't you want peripheral circulation if your fight or flight was triggered? Because like you wanna be ready to like fight tigers and things? Or you just need to get more for cardiac and brain so you can run away? Right. Oh, okay. Makes sense. The things you didn't know about what your body does to prepare for sex in the bedroom.

I have a gentleman I'm treating right now, and he was getting up and going to the bathroom 3 times a night, and that all stopped.

Oh, you solved that problem. That's kind of important.

Um, what was his big thing? But yeah, it was just— so when you lower the size of the pee, then your bladder is not as hypersensitive.

I think my mom needs that. Now I'm hearing a lot of grinding in the back. Are you guys working on my bike guard, or?

Uh, now Philip's working on something else. Okay, I think he brought your night guard up already.

Has anyone created a bite guard that has, you know, multiple pressure sensors per tooth so you can get like a quantitative picture of what's going on in the teeth? That'd be kind of a cool thing.

There's a— there is a machine that you put in there and have you bite, and it shows both pressure and timing.

Oh, cool.

So it shows what you touch first and how hard you hit.

Yeah, I want to make that embeddable so I just get a constant signal from my teeth and I won't even know it's there. That'll happen, give us 25 years.

So they're also doing those pressure sensors for, um, head trauma.

Oh yeah, inside a helmet, that's really important.

But they're doing them in the mouth too.

Oh, in a bite guard.

Cool.

All right, I'm hitting more on the left side than the right now.

Okay.

Very small amounts, but—

So since the trigeminal is a major influence on brain blood flow, how you bite is a major factor in whether or not you develop a concussion. Ah. Right? That is, people whose trigeminal is overactive and unstable will be a lot more likely to go unconscious with trauma. And whether you go unconscious or not is a major factor whether they decide if you had a concussion or not. Whether your CYP levels are up or not is going to be a major factor on whether you recover from a head trauma. So, I have a different hypothesis on the trauma scenario. Most people think that the multiple traumas cause late years degenerate— neurodegenerations, right? I think that most likely these people have a pre-existing bad bite that makes them prone to a concussion, and the pre-existing long-term bite dysfunction is what leads to the neurodegeneration in the long term. That is not really the direct traumas that's causing the problem. You should heal and recuperate, but for the fact that there's a constant microtrauma going on.

It's that resilience model that I work on with Bulletproof, where Hits to the head, bad idea, but if you have a chronic thing that's already making you weak, even if it's not something you notice, then you get the hit and then you get the damage. If the chronic weaknesses that are invisible without a lot of self-reflection or technology, you're not going to get all the resilience that comes with it. There's a lot of MMA fighters who are fans of the Bulletproof page or listen to the podcast and all. So if you're a professional or semi-professional fighter, you're gonna be taking hits to the jaw, which is gonna mess with alignment, and you're also gonna be taking hits to the head, which can cause concussions. So you think there, well, certainly there would be an improvement in endurance and improvement in strength from having your jaw aligned. So like, that should be obvious. Should they be like seeing you or someone with your type of specialty after a fight where they're taking some headshots because their jaw's gonna get misaligned just by physical trauma?

Could. Yeah. So like on Muhammad Ali, it's that as everybody has rationalized that his Parkinson's is from getting hit so many times, right?

And you're like, it's his jaw.

He broke his jaw, right? And no, no one would ever— Oh yeah, no one would ever check it, fine-tune it.

All right, so what about Mike Tyson?

Um, What's his latest on him? I'm not familiar with him.

Well, I mean, he's taken a lot of hits to the head. And he's actually an amazing guy when you meet him in person. I had an opportunity to do that a couple years ago in Hong Kong.

There's a massive bone structure there, though.

Guy's just big, right? He's big. And he's funny. But I mean, his speech has changed through his fighting career, right? Yeah.

So he's getting a little bit of a distortion in his speech? Yeah.

You could say that. And I'm wondering, like, if you're not I'm not familiar with that.

So most speech defects are due to jaw misalignment?

Really? I just gotta imagine, like, looking at those fights, how could your jaw not be misaligned after, you know, a 200-something-pound guy just smacks you full on in the jaw?

But the entire speech pathology community doesn't look at dental orthopedics. Wow.

That's kind of sad.

So lisping is usually that the teeth don't line up well, and so then you tongue thrust to make your own splint. Oh. And then that pops up like that.

Oh, because your teeth were hitting and it was hurting.

So you're used to your jaw being further apart, and so you don't close that gap to control airflow.

Okay.

So it's a lack of airflow control that makes you lisp.

Interesting. And wow, so basically you could change the height of the back molars and people with a lisp could stop lisping.

Yeah.

Does it change other behavioral things too?

It does affect anxiety.

So you'd be less anxious all day in addition to getting rid of a speech impediment, which itself causes anxiety. That's kind of a good thing.

Wow.

So I feel like my jaw is— there's some tension and some relaxation, like it's trying to realign itself. So I've got a lot of like muscular tension right here.

On the left or right?

It's actually on both sides, let's say.

We're getting close.

And my visual field feels more stressed on the upper left here. That's the weakest part of my visual field, but I'm feeling more stress there than normal.

That's one of my big complaints with the medical community. Ocular motor coordination goes through the trigeminal.

Oh, really?

Uh-huh. And so, ocular motor defects, like kids with reading comprehension, eye tracking issues, they never look at the bites.

So Helen Erland, she's been on the podcast, she spoke at the Bulletproof Conference. She's the woman who about 30 years ago figured out that about, I wanna say, 48 or 58% of people, might have just been 48, have visual sensitivities to certain colors. And you can take kids with dyslexia or ADD or autism and you put colored lenses on them or you put it on a sheet of paper and they can read. And I went through this kind of analysis and training and they basically said, you know, Dave, You probably would have had severe dyslexia except your eye tracking is perfect. Maybe because I learned to read at a young age instead of learning to crawl and move properly, so I had other functional movement problems. It's interesting. I wear orange glasses a lot, and they just give me more of my brain back all day. I've increased my resilience. I am resilient under fluorescent lights a lot more than I used to be, but they still, after a while, I feel like crap. I want to be in the zone all the time, so I'm willing to go to extreme lengths there. But I wonder when I look at my eye tracking, even though my jaw alignment was pretty bad, is there an explanation for why my body was able to have essentially perfect eye tracking? Not eye teaming. My eye teaming sucks. But I could read every line perfectly even though now that I've learned to see it, there's like floaty pictures and fields and colors all around the words. I just tuned them out. Any thoughts on jaw alignment?

So everything that we do is chaotic. It's not predictable. You know, 2% is going to get this and 2% is going to get that. And so it's very chaotic how it impacts things.

Now there's something weird happening. I keep crossing my legs and I don't normally sit with my legs crossed, but when I started here I had no desire to do that. And as my jaw is realigning itself because there aren't weird pressures on it right now, Why do I want to keep crossing my legs? Is there a connection between that alignment and this alignment?

Hmm, don't know that.

Don't know that?

But yeah, dental or leg crossing I think is a—

It's a height adjusting thing for your low back, right?

But it would also, I think it's also a little bit of an anxiety thing too.

Oh, it could be just because dental thing.

Yeah.

Okay.

Left front mesial oblique.

I definitely feel like I'm getting a little tired from doing this. There's also, when I was younger, my left eye, the eye itself wasn't lazy, but the eyelid, like I'd close my eyes and the left eye would open much more slowly than the right eye. And jaw alignment connections with that or something else?

So eyelid, blink reflex. This is a very interesting neurological fact too. So blink reflex is trigeminal sensory into the brain and 7th nerve out to close it.

Interesting.

So like, um, 70% of Parkinson's patients have a blink reflex defect.

Wow.

But nobody's ever looked at the trigeminal, right? It's like—

so the 7th cranial nerve comes out from somewhere up in the upper back.

It's still inside the brain.

But where's the other terminating end of it, right?

It's going to be in the brain.

In the brain. Oh, okay. So it's too high. So it's not— okay, cool.

Yeah, it's gonna be in there.

Yeah, I'm getting more hitting on the left than the right now. Oh, but my legs are crossed. It's more on the right. Yeah, there's a high spot right here.

Feel the right side. That was left. This is right.

Yeah, definitely.

The other way you can check these is feel your masseters. Masseters fire at first tooth contact. Slowly clench on those. Pretty good. But this is a pretty sensitive EMG machine as to how— whether those surface EMGs are jumping equally or simultaneously.

I feel kind of like it's sliding around a bit. I'll probably just get used to that. Now, I definitely want those teeth to fill in. Like, when I see even, like, the other neuromuscular guy who looked at this, they're all like, you've got to get those teeth filled in. Like, you have a temporary thing going on. You're only hitting on one tooth in the back, and you really want to have the lower teeth there raised up. So is putting essentially more caps on those teeth a good idea, or just pulling them up using I'd pull them out. Okay, cool.

But people function just quite well even on one tooth. I mean, they will have a lot of— I mean, there's a lot of people out there that are missing one or more of their molars, which means they're basically functioning just on one molar.

Okay.

And they do just fine. A lot of dentists get concerned about it, but there's a lot of people that are in partials that have only one back molar And they— people, people do just fine.

Excellent.

So I'm gonna mix up some acrylic for your night one.

All right. Now, whatever the acrylic solvent is always gives me headaches, so I'm gonna hold my breath while we're molding that if it's gonna be in my mouth.

So we're gonna let this thing set up pretty much before we put it in your mouth. Okay. A little off-gas. Quite a bit.

Cool. And then I'll rinse my mouth as soon as it's done. I can hold my breath for a couple minutes.

Yeah.

I haven't got the Tim Ferriss 5-minute breath-holding technique down yet. I'm still working on that.

I was always the best one in high school. I could hold my breath longer than anybody else.

Oh, that's cool.

And in dental school, we had machines for checking lung function. And me and another kid had the largest lung capacity. And I think both of us were trumpet players.

I thought you were going to say that you guys were experimenting to see who could hold on to nitrous oxide the longest. So I've done nitrous oxide with a dentist once when I was in my early 20s, and it just jacked me up. Like, I felt terrible for a while after that. And I think it's because I have too much inducible nitric oxide, which causes inflammation. But most people don't have enough eNOS, which is endothelial nitric oxide. So for erections and for proper vascular flow, you want eNOS, not iNOS. And it's mostly a gut bacteria thing that causes iNOS. I don't believe I have that anymore. I can actually take things that increase my nitric oxide levels, and sometimes they're too low now, which I actually test with a little saliva detector. So it's kind of interesting that We know that nitric oxide is an amazing signaling molecule, and we knew nothing about it a while ago, and now we're figuring out sulfate is probably the same, and that's another thing you can test.

So they have a nitric oxide saliva test? Wow. So is this a dipstick?

Yeah, you just lick one end of it, fold it over. I've actually included one of those in my quarterly gift box. I have a thing every quarter I send a group of people like the cool biohacking toys. Then you can use nutrition like eat more vegetables, and you can use a few other targeted supplements that will raise nitric oxide, which is kind of important. Now we have some squishy solvent-based crap on here, so I'm going to hold my breath while we do this. Is it time for me to mold it?

Almost, not quite.

The smell of that stuff even kind of gives me a bit of a buzz. I don't know what's in it, but—

Methyl methacrylate, which—

I can smell it from here. It's interesting. I probably should have— actually, I do. I have a tube of my glutathione back there. I'll take that after I do this. Help my liver take care of whatever that is.

So we're going to put this in and have you bite on it. Want to make sure that it's lined up as best as possible.

All right.

Minimize our adjustment needs on it.

This stuff smells like paint thinner and epoxy mix.

It's gross. The appliance that we use for nighttime is what a lot of dentists would call a neutral bionator. We call it a nocturnal orthopedic positioner, but it basically fits both jaws simultaneously. Both the upper teeth and lower teeth fit into it on what we think is ideal trajectory, and so it doesn't let the jaw fall back at nighttime. It keeps the lower chin in the same position. A lot of dentists use flat splints, upper, lower, whatever, and they don't really control jaw alignment, particularly when you go unconscious. About 40% of our pain patients don't do well at at all until we make them a night appliance that keeps them aligned at nighttime. I went to try to buy some urine strips for one of my patients who's having the lupus, and my medical— the medical supply company wouldn't let me order the strips.

Why not?

Because the dentist— stupidest thing there is. So you go to eBay, you can buy all you want.

I was just gonna say, have they heard of the internet?

Yeah, just go to eBay where you can buy it all you want.

You can buy anything you want online.

Actually, part of the high-priced medical supply thing is starting to break down too. You're starting to see some of the dental supplies that you can buy either from China or Israel or wherever you want them. They're everywhere available at a lot less price than you can buy them here through the dental supply houses. Mm-hmm.

I believe it. It frankly pisses me off that there's people who think I shouldn't be able to buy something to do something to my own body. I just don't understand that other than as economic protectionism.

Yeah, that's what it is.

They just shut down the Silk Road too, which was a place where people were buying all sorts of things, including pharmaceuticals that they wanted access to that they couldn't get access to, and also illegal drugs and whatever. But I think that there's a big problem when, in order to get a pharmaceutical drug, you spend way more than it costs.

So that's the other thing that you might need to know is that Substance P is tested only by one company, Quest. And Quest is totally confused as to what's proper. Yeah, they do blood tests. So Quest, I had personal conversations with them. They told me that they tested 30 employees to come up with their norm without knowing the medical background of these people. They just ran 30 employees and said this is what normal is. And so, on their 30 employees, they had one that was at 2,800 and one that was about 2,000, and all the rest were less than 1,000. So they set the norm at 1,700. And so then it says, "Well, send me your last 100 samples," right? They sent me the last 50 samples. And the last 50, I don't think— I think there was one or two over 1,000. Like 1,200 or something.

Oh, wow.

And so then they conceded that the level should probably be less than 1,000, but they've never changed it. So if you order a substance P test through Quest, they still say on there that 1,700 is normal.

Wow. That brings up a whole bigger issue in the testing industry about quality standards and— This is hitting my gum. Almost got it. Yeah, my jaw certainly won't slide back.

Can we just lean you back? Want to check it lying down?

Yeah, sure. And this is important. So my, if when I go to sleep, and I do sleep on my back sometimes, especially if I've got headphones in with sounds on it, when I lay back, even if my jaw falls open like this, this metal thing catches on my top teeth. So even if I'm like, I don't allow my jaw to do this. See how it falls back? We don't want that to happen. So I do this. If I do clench, I'm not going to be wearing my teeth down. And even if I just totally relax, like these guys These metal tabs keep my jaw from doing that, which is why I can sleep on my back, which isn't a great idea if you're not doing this, or I can sleep on my side. Same thing, it's going to hold my jaw in position, which means all night long, do I get more efficient sleep? Yeah. Do I get more blood in my brain? Yeah. When there's more blood flow in the brain, there's more oxygen. When there's more oxygen, the mitochondria can do their job better. Mitochondria control the glymphatic recirculation system, which happens at night, that drains cerebrospinal fluid that contains cellular waste products. So is sleep efficiency controlled by your BiteGuard? To some extent, yeah, it is. And I certainly got great benefits from using it and plan to keep doing that.

It's good. How's that feel? Should feel like you're hitting evenly and simultaneously on the back teeth. Yep.

It feels— let's see, actually, the top right is not hitting. The bottom on both sides is hitting. Top left is hitting. So I think the top left needs to come down a bit.

Yep.

Yeah, actually I felt that when I was clenching. I got a twinge in the right.

So most people typically get pain on their low side when they close up and hit on the high side. Then to get the left— the low side together, they have to torque the jaw.

That's what happened when I was clenching there. I felt it on— it was the top of it was low, and I got the twinge on the top right of my my jaw here.

And that's also why most people get into hypersensitivity on teeth. Oops. And so the dentist will typically grind the tooth down a little bit more to think, think that they're hitting too hard on it, and then they end up needing a root canal. So it's the low side that usually has to do the more work and gets more neurologically hyperreactive. So hypersensitivity is something that's very poorly understood by the medical community. And that's my average patient is a hypersensitive person. They're reactive to light and to noise and the food and the drugs and the hot and the cold and the stress. And that's from the elevated substance POM. One of my patients, a 45-year-old female, she couldn't tolerate red wine. And after we fixed her bite, she could tolerate red wine. So it's just a hypersensitivity, right? They get more reactive. Hyperacusis and—

There's a lot of triggers for autoimmunity. And have you found that having elevated substance P increases like Hashimoto's or hypopituitarism and things like that?

Yes. Wow. I had a patient just the other day Came in, oh yes, my receptionist in the other office, her daughter, we just finished her, we did buildups, crowns on her, and she came back 3 months later and she'd been on, I think she was 0.7 grains of thyroid for 20 years, and she just went into overdose on her thyroid medication. She had to cut it back after 20 years.

I reversed my Hashimoto's. I have no more antibodies, but For me, that happened several years after we did the alignment of the jaw. I wouldn't say that—

So what do you think worked on yours?

I think it was avoidance of grain and avoidance of mycotoxins in food and the environment because I could show multiple studies that show that they trigger the autoimmune response to the pituitary and the thyroid. In fact, that's one of the reasons I think that the whole grain avoidance paleo template works that people don't really talk about. Is that it's naturally a low mycotoxin diet because you eliminate grains, you eliminate grain-fed animals, you dramatically reduce things like aflatoxin and ochratoxin in the diet.

One more time here. Using carbon paper doesn't work for this well at all. Carbon paper is just not nearly accurate or sensitive enough. This material is 3-dimensional, so you can look through it and use it as a pressure gauge, much like putting an engine together. Um, and carbon paper shows you where you hit, but it doesn't show you what part of the opposing tooth is causing the hitting. It's important to know not only where you're hitting on the bottom, but what part of the upper tooth is causing the hitting. And carbon paper is just not accurate enough for that, which is what most dentists use. How's that feeling now?

When I clench really hard, I get the twinges up here. I think it's still too low up here compared to over here. Yeah, it definitely doesn't feel good.

Wow. So the one boy downstairs has severe hyperacusis. He was, I think he was, his bite was off from birth, so he got an eye infection and inflammation. He lost his eye at, I think, 9 months of age. And then he's had severe hyperacusis all of his life. And he's starting to do a lot better. He's got him opened up, widened him quite a bit, got him end-on-end bites. And he's doing much better. He's moved out here in the last 4 months from his mother's, living on his own. So when Substance P alters cell membrane and it hypersensitizes things, then you lose homeostasis. You no longer appropriately respond to sensory input because of the hypersensitivity. And so then you start just getting into all kinds of illness problems from inappropriate sensory response.

Yeah, the jaw tension over here is much less when I clench really hard. There's still a bit of a twinge, but I think it's just an echo from what was going on earlier. So it feels like it's hitting right. It does still feel stronger on the left.

Check it one more time.

Yeah, I think we might want to. There's just a little bit of a height difference and it's hard to feel at first, but it's there.

So I'm working on starting a— have you ever heard of chiropractic neurology? It's a guy who started about probably 15 years ago. Certification for chiropractors in advanced training in neurology. So I'm looking at starting a dental neurology— Mm-hmm. —specialty. And so I'm looking at setting up study clubs and training programs. I'm probably gonna do a West Coast, Midwest, and an East Coast, and probably one in Europe.

How can people— there's a lot of medical professionals who listen to Bulletproof radio. How can people find out more about that?

Talk loud. We're probably within a month or so going to come out with a website, so maybe we can have that ready for you then too. Okay. So I'm teaming up with the chiropractic neurologists. They have an annual meeting every year on functional neurology. Dave Asprey. And so we'll probably join forces with them on our annual meeting. So I don't have to totally reinvent the wheel.

Cool. Yeah, this is better. When I, when I clench really hard, it's still flexing more up here than over here.

Is that supposed to? Flexing more, meaning that, um—

When I squeeze hard, I feel almost everything right here, not over here, which makes me wonder if this side is still lower.

So when you lie down and first touch, they're pretty simultaneous. But as you clench— it's that first contact that's important. Is that your first— when you first contact with it?

I think we're even. Yeah, cool. So if this looked like It sounds like a lot of work and like very fine precise adjustments. It is, but you figure I'm going to be spending, well in my case, about 6 hours a night, just about every night for the next foreseeable long period of time with this in. Getting it right matters. So a normal visit takes what, about an hour? Yeah. Well, Dr. Jennings, as always, thanks for hacking my jaw. My substance P is already feeling better. Great. Activated coconut charcoal is one of my favorite products. This is something that I've been working on for quite a while. This is the purest form of activated charcoal you can get. We actually take the top 15% finest particles and we give the rest to things like hospitals or other supplement manufacturers. This is truly the purest you can get. What it does when you take it is it preferentially binds to the toxins that are in your gut. Toxins in your gut come from foods that you eat, but they also come from the microbes that live in your stomach. When those microbes are stressed, they put out more toxins.

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