Biological Dentistry with Dr. Dawn Ewing

Welcome to the Wellness Dentist Podcast. Join biological and cosmetic dentist Dr. Katie to as she explores holistic wellness through trending ideas, real stories and patient experiences. This podcast will inspire you to make healthy lifestyle choices and take charge of your dental wellness. And now, your host, the wellness dentist, Dr. Katie To.

Hi, I'm Dr. Katie to and welcome to the Wellness Dentist Dentist podcast. I'm so excited for you guys today because we have Dr. Dawn Ewing. Dr. Dawn Ewing is not only the expert in biological dentistry, she's the executive director of the IABDM and also my personal naturopath and healthcare provider that helping me going through this wellness journey. So, Dr. Dawn, thank you so much for being here.

I'm excited to be here.

Yes. So, Dr. Dawn, can you share with our listener a little bit about yourself?

Yeah. I started off in dentistry as a dental hygienist, went through the UTDB and got out and got super involved with all that conventional world. I was a member of the Hygiene Association. I got appointed by the governor of Texas to be on the Texas State Board of Dental Examiners for two years. And dentistry just didn't excite me as much as some other things did. So I got involved in emergency medicine, which is pretty exciting. You get to ride on an ambulance and, you know, things don't happen in dental office. Thank goodness. Bad things don't happen in a dental office. But it really made you think on your feet. And after being in emergency medicine for quite some time, I got exposed to the world of naturopaths and more complementary medicine. And oddly enough, a lot of people were having problems with their health because of their teeth. And that took me on another path to then pursue a PhD in integrative medicine, which kind of marries both worlds because there are a lot of health problems that are caused by teeth and a lot of people that have tooth problems because of health issues. So it goes both ways.

Yeah. And a lot of listeners and audience probably going to know you from a very popular documentary a couple years ago.

Yes, Root Cause blew the roof off, literally. Root canals are, you know, your body was never designed to have something dead in it. And there is a consequence, not for everybody, but if you have a compromised immune system and you've got bacteria that's inside those root canals. And I think the misgiving for most people is that when a root canal is done, it's sterile and that it will always be sterile. You're taking out the nerve and the blood supply and the lymphatics inside the tooth. But there is no way to get all the flesh out. Even with all the cool tools that we have, with gentle wave, we can't get everything out. And that bacteria is put on this planet by God himself to scavenge dead flesh, and somehow it ends up inside that tooth. We know that when we take out teeth and we test them and we send them off, we have yet to find a sterile tooth. It just doesn't happen. That bacteria ends up in there. It's anaerobic. It lives without oxygen. It's in a dark, moist, warm environment with lots of food, and therefore it propagates. And then as you chew, every single time you push down on that tooth, that bacteria mushes out. That's a real medical term. And ends up in your blood system circulating and can set up a secondary infection someplace else in your body. So it is true that root canals can cause a problem for people. Now, I'm not advocating that every person get every root canal tooth removed, because I think that's a bad move, but it needs to be evaluated to see if it is a problem for you. And if it is, then okay, then you're going to end up losing a tooth. And we have options for that as well.

Yeah. And I can definitely add on to that. Every single root canal that we take out in the office, we send it into a lab called DNA Connections in Colorado, and it get tested and the result come back. And patient and their physicians always reach out and say, I could not believe these are from cebra canal teeth.

It's unbelievable when you look at the list of the bacteria that are in there, and the patient's been trying to find out what's wrong with them, all of a sudden you find Borrelia, which is Lyme, inside a tooth. And you're going, how in the world did it get there? But some people can deal with it. You know, when my patients ask, I tell them there are people that are 105 that are smoking. I wouldn't tell them that they have to smoke or stop smoking. Their immune system is just completely different. And of course, now we know about genetics. And so that's kind of changed absolutely everything. But it does help us understand why two people in the same family, one person can handle something and another person can't because your genes are different.

Absolutely. Make a big difference. We've seen a lot of family come in, and one kid would floss and brush and have cavity, and the other kid would not do as good. But they don't have cavities.

No decay. Yeah.

Yes. So is being a certified biological Dentist. I'm a member of ibdm, and I know the public did not really understand what the IBDM roles in biological dentistry for certified dentists. What does that mean to be a certified biological dentist? So, Dr. Dawn, can you share with us a bit more about that vision and that program?

I really think there are three organizations that work very hard to educate dentists about mercury being toxic and safe ways to remove mercury fillings, which are commonly called amalgams, or even sometimes they stretch it and call them silver fillings, making you feel like you've got something that's a prized possession in your mouth, when really it's 50% mercury. Those three organizations, one of them does do an accreditation saying, okay, we recognize that you can safely remove mercury fillings. But when Covid came, now, mind you, we'd had a certification program for quite some time. But as Covid scared laypeople into going to dentists anymore, don't want to go to a dentist because we don't know how this virus is being passed. A biological office was the safest place to be because we were already using equipment that would protect the staff. Therefore, we were protecting the patient just from mercury vapors and everything else that goes along with biological dentistry. But we didn't want people to join the wagon of becoming a member of a biological organization and then being able to call themselves a biological dentist, because that is very misleading to the public. So we changed our protocol, and we made it mandatory that if you joined the organization, you had to go through the certification process before we would list you on the website. And that's really for the protection of the public, because it is difficult as a layperson to find people that are actually knowledgeable about the things they say or think they are knowledgeable in. And that goes even for medicine as well. You'll read somebody's website that will say that they can do something, but if you really dig deep and find out where they got certified, they didn't get certified in that, but they're listing it on their website. And that is even more true in certain countries. I'm not picking on any countries, but some countries, they don't care what you put on your website, and therefore, it's a stretch.

Yeah. We have patients that file our office through the IBDM website and the website. As I know, they only list the certified biological dentist right now.

Yes, there's tons of information for the public. We've got podcasts, we have videos, and I believe we're one of the few organizations that if you call, we actually Return your call and or pick up the phone and help you if you can't find someone in your area, which is not uncommon because not everybody can be a biological office. It's expensive to get the education, it's expensive to have the equipment, it's expensive to educate your staff. If you were going to redo a kitchen, you would have a choice between having Formica or tile or granite. If you're going to go for granite, your bid is going to be more expensive than if you're going for the Formica. And so unfortunately, when you are asking how much something is going to cost to get repaired, you have to compare apples to apples. And a lot of people don't realize that. So they'll just call an office and say, I need to have a tooth taken out. How much is that going to cost? And that could vary from $50 to $2,000. And I realize that's a big difference, but there might be a lot of difference between the kind of care that you're going to get in both those situations.

And I know a lot of our patients and Listener does have questions about what one thing the biological dentistry or wellness practitioners stand out, especially in this dental field. To me, that is biocompatibility. And I do having a lot of patients come in and say, I got this material done or I got this work done and now I have this symptom and the dentist don't believe that that's what caused it. And Dr. Dunn, can you share a little bit of the work that you do with biocompatibility?

Yes. You are testing to make sure that your body is going to be okay with something that is going to be placed in you. Then is going to be an exposure 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If you're allergic to a strawberry, it would not matter if that was an organic strawberry, you are still going to react to it. When I talk to a dentist that is not necessarily biologically minded, you'll hear we use this kind of white filling material and we've never had a problem. Well, they've never had a problem that they are aware of because the patient may have started having headaches and and never thought to go back to the dentist and say, ever since I had this filling, I've had headaches. So what will happen is they'll end up at their primary care saying, wow, for the last three months I've had headaches, but every day I have to take ibuprofen or Tylenol or Sudafed and I wake up the next day, have a headache again. So their assumption is, well, you could have anemia. Let's draw blood. The blood work comes back, no, we don't see any anemia. But I do hear that you're having headaches. So I tell you what, maybe you have a brain tumor. Let's do a CT scan and an MRI only to find out that they don't really have anything wrong. So let's just write a prescription for Neurontin. And that should take care of your headaches. When the root cause is that they're reacting to something that was placed in their body, there's nothing as good as what God gave you. Originally, dentistry has not figured out how to grow teeth with stem cells. Love to say that we have, but we haven't. So everything that we put in you, we have to test to make sure that you're not going to react to. And that is a big difference. I've had patients that have been told by their doctor, it's not possible that you're reacting to that denture, and yet the roof of their mouth is completely broken out. In that case, I asked the guy to take his denture out and put it on his arm for about 10 minutes and then call me. And he had actually a red mark where his denture was. So obviously he was reacting to the denture. But the dentist said it's not possible that it's the denture, because I've never seen that before. And that's a horrible reason, because he's never seen it before. It can't be possible. He just hasn't seen it before. But we do see reactions to everything from the anesthetics to the glues that are used to the white filling materials. A lot of people don't realize that some of the materials we use are glass. Some of them are plastic, some of them are ceramic or porcelain. And all of those materials require a different bonding agent or glue to stick to the tooth. That's right, because the material itself is not sticky or that would be gross. It would stick to all your food when you ate it, too. So we have to make it be a bonded part of your tooth so that hopefully it becomes a part of and doesn't break out. And you can be allergic to. They're all chemicals. So that does set biological dentistry apart. We have a list of questions on the website to help guide people so that they can call an office and they know what questions to ask, but they also have the answers written down there so that if they don't get the appropriate answer, then they should just move on to another office.

Yeah, that's a lot of resource on the IBDM website for sure. And, Dr. Dawn, if the public want to know if they're compatible to something, what can they do?

Well, there are people that do muscle testing. There are people that use eav. There is blood testing that can be done. I mean, those are the three most common ways. Some doctors will do Melisa testing as well. That's usually more common in Europe than it is here in the United States, but those are the three most common ways. I think another thing that sets biological dentistry apart is that it's a team effort, and a biological office will network very tightly with a team for the patient's sake. There could be a chiropractor that might make an adjustment so that your atlas and axis are in line before you're going to have major dental work done. So that your smile is not only straight, but that your walk is straight, because we don't want you to have a straight smile. But then you walk with a hitch and you get along, and then you go back to your dentist and you get adjusted, and now your smile is good, but then everything else is off. So it takes a coordinated effort. Biological office will look for things like tongue ties. They'll look at your airway to make sure that you're able to breathe, that the reason you're not having sleep apnea is something that could be repaired instead of something that could just have a band aid put on it. They will network with a cardiologist, with someone who can offer chelation after the amalgams are removed safely. So most dental offices, it's just a dental office, they don't really network with a team. And it's important that the team is involved because in a biological office, they're doing things like an extraction, and they're drawing blood from you and spinning it down and putting that plug of healthy self back into the extraction site. And yet they get trained to look at that plug. And if it looks different than a perfectly healthy one, that might mean a referral back to their primary care to check maybe their vitamin D level, make sure that everything's okay. So regular dental offices, they just focus on the mouth, scraping the teeth, keeping them clean, drill and fill and bill. Biological office says, wow, your child has two cavities in there on opposite sides. But those teeth are on the same energetic pathway, and that is attached to the lung and large intestine. I can hear that they're breathing. Okay. They have Any asthma, and I don't have any asthma. How often do they have a bowel movement? Oh, at least twice a week. Okay. That's a problem. And you have to understand that that problem of just being constipated will not allow the same amount of energy to go to the teeth that are related to that particular organ. And therefore those teeth are going to be more susceptible to decay. So biological office in their head, all these things are spinning. And their goal is that once we get your mouth fixed and all the decay taken care of, we don't really want to do work on you again. Unless you're in a car accident, something happens and you break out a tooth or drop a bowling ball and it bounces up and you break a tooth. We're looking for reasons why is your body creating decay. And it's a big part of the prevention.

Yeah. In biological office, we actually doing less dentistry because people keep their teeth longer and healthier. And we have a big part that we always talk about to the patient is nutrition. And I know Dr. Dawn always mentions with the patient that you are what you eat. Right. So not many office talking about it because this can be a sensitive topic to a lot of people. It's not easy to implement because the patient do all the work. They got to prep their meal, they got to choose what they put into the body. And to us, that's patient responsibility, but we guiding them and telling them what better for their teeth and their body. A lot of doctors also surprised when they know biological dentists look at blood work.

Right.

And Dr. Dawn, you're teaching the course, the blood panel for dentists. Can you share a little bit more what you're really looking for in those blood work that the dentist need to be aware, patient need to be paying attention to?

Yeah. I think it's not good timing to take out amalgams if the person's kidney function is not good. And it is amazing to me how many people don't know that they're already in stage two renal failure. I mean, it just blows me away that nobody has talked to them about that. That a bilirubin could be too high or liver enzymes could be so crazy out of balance that it probably is better for that dentist to return that patient to a primary care and get them into a healthier place before they're going to go through the mercury removal. It's not something that you just jump into lightly. I know people read articles, hear shows, and recognize that the mercury is toxic and can cause all kinds of micro neurological problems. But the worst thing to do is get it taken out incorrectly because then the repercussions for that could take years and much more money to get the heavy metals out of the person's body than if they had just been patient and taken the correct steps to have the mercury removal done.

Yeah. And like vitamin D, what do you see in most of people that you.

See the blood work that's, you know, we're in a southern state and so I was told in school that if you're in a sunshine state, don't even worry about vitamin D. But to be honest, I've had people come back with vitamin D levels as low as 8. A healthy reading should be between 60 and 80. You can overdose on vitamin D, but I'm very fair complected genetically. I do not absorb vitamin D from sunshine. So it wouldn't matter if I went outside and got a sunburn or if I went outside and I dedicated 10 minutes a day. I'm not going to increase my vitamin D level and therefore I have to take vitamin D on a daily basis. That's not something that traditional dentists are trained to even ask, what's your vitamin D level? I'm about to take out your wisdom teeth or I'm taking out a tooth that broke, taking out a tooth that abscessed. And if your vitamin D level is not good, it's going to be really hard for that area to heal properly and fill in with healthy bones. So it is an important question.

Yeah. And we see a lot of patient that had implant done because implant is really popular and common these days and the implant failing on them. And they're not smoker, they're not diabetic patient. But guess what, their vitamin D is super low. So the bone and the implant is not integrated and they never get tested to see if they're compatible with the titanium implant, which is the metal one, or the ceramic one, which is the zirconia one. So again, biocompatibility is super, super important. We actually have patients that not even compatible with the glass, the ceramic implant. And so the only way to find out is get tested. Yeah, absolutely. And if their patients is looking for the resource and you know, I'm not just looking for biological dentists because they know they need to go to IBDM website to look for that certified biological dentist, but they also want to looking for naturopath chiropractors. What is the best way for them to reach out?

Yeah, really the best thing to do is to network with a biological office, a biological Office has to have a team. They just have to. It's not possible to. When people come back and tell me, hey, I had my amalgams taken out 12 years ago and it's not possible for me to have heavy metals. Why is it not possible? My dentist, he took them out, he chelated. No, the dentist did not do the chelation because that's outside of their scope of practice. So if you didn't go someplace and you weren't at a physician's office, so calling a biological office and asking the front desk person, I need a primary care physician. That's alternative minded. I need to do some chelation. So I want somebody that is trained and certified in chelation, which ICIM and ACAM certified physicians to do chelation. It's not something that you want to go online. I could name names. I'm not going to. There are programs out there where it seems like there's a support group of individuals and they can help guide you through the process and you can do it on your own. That's about as foolish as trying to do brain surgery on yourself with a mirror and a drill. It's just not good. There are too many little quirks. Chelation really needs to be individualized for that individual. Do they have an MTHFR flaw or a comt. Is there a methylation issue? What heavy metal is the highest? Is it lead? Is it mercury? Is it bismuth? Is it uranium? Each of those may have a different chelating agent to help bring that down. The body removes heavy metals based on an order. You can't just choose. I want to have mercury taken out and I'm going to bypass all this other stuff and get this out. So what we don't want is people getting sicker, trying to do it themselves, or worse yet, lose a kidney because they go to somebody who doesn't know what they're doing. It's very taxing to a kidney when you're mobilizing the heavy metals. You can even use vitamin C and move mercury from the inside of a cell to the extracellular space. And if your body's working correctly, it would then go into the potty. But if you have a methylation issue like I do, then it just goes into another cell. So there's an order of correcting the methylation issue before you even get into the process of trying to clean up the body. And when you dishonor that, it just doesn't work.

Yeah. And a lot of people learn that the hard way, unfortunately. Yeah. And I was one of Them when the chelation was too fast, too strong and your body cannot handle that. And so right now I'm working with Dr. Dawn to go through in that personalized process. And I'm telling you your body can handle it when it's slow dose and low dose. And so definitely working with professional know what they're doing. Because I got a lot of messaging on social media, lots of followers was like, I got my mercury out safely. Now I want to, you know, doing the detox or the chelation on my own because I'm on this Facebook group and they're showing me the result. And my answer is always, don't do it.

Right.

Don't do it. Find somebody that done it professionally, trained to do it, help you guide through it.

Yeah. Somebody who's trained is going to look at your blood work first and make sure that you're healthy enough to withstand going through chelation. And then some of them, most of them will do a hair test not to see if you have heavy metals because your hair is a trash can. So you could be completely filled with mercury and have very little mercury come out in the hair, which is a bad sign. But then they'll do a provoked urine test to find out what heavy metal you actually have. Somebody who does chelation on you and has no idea where your levels are. How would you ever know you're done? I mean, you have to have a starting place and you have to have an ending place. And I do recognize that we're talking about paying more money than to somebody who is going to try to do it on their own. And there are a lot of options when you hit the Internet. Homeopathics, as far as chelating or different supplements used to be, chelation was primarily iv. It's not anymore. But still you need somebody helping you and guiding you through that process.

Yeah. And what is the number one advice for people that having mercury root canals and definitely having an idea that there's no problem going on in there, what is the first step for them to do?

Well, first step, if you have a practitioner in your area that understands the tooth body connection, and we do have practitioners here, we're blessed that they can take a look and then direct you about where to go. And that might be going to a biological office. It might be seeing someone like me who would do the prep work for the biological office, would test all the teeth to see if there's a meridian that is being compromised because of a tooth or if there's an organ that is causing a tooth problem. And give that information both to the primary care and to a biological dentist. It might be just finding a biological office first that becomes a priority. And I do recognize that asking someone to go to a biological office is more expensive than seeing someone who is on an insurance plan. I am not saying that those dentists that are on an insurance plan are bad dentists. If you don't have a dental problem, you don't have a root canal that is a problem. You don't have mercury fillings, maybe you don't even have any fillings and you just need someplace to get your teeth cleaned. That's great. But if you're having problems, you really should get your mouth all in order. And then if you have to go back to the dentist that you love, that is your next door neighbor and friendly as all get out. It didn't mean that they were a bad person. It just meant that they couldn't provide the service that you needed at that time. And you have to do what's right for you.

Yes. And there's resources on the website so you can look into the IBDM website, this functional medicine website that the doctor understands the tooth body connections and Definitely, you know, Dr. Dawn just mentioned earlier, you can always call IBDM.

You can always call IBDM. You'll talk to either myself or my husband Toby.

Yeah. And IBDM is not only for dentists, it's medicines also.

Right.

So there's not only just a dentist members of IBDM, but we have naturopath, chiropractors, M.D. dOS on that. So we can definitely guide you to the right resource. And Dr. Dawn, that's a lot of good information and I know you taught a lot of biological dentists, a lot of lecture around the country and international. What's the best way to reach out to you and contact you?

You can either go through the website, it will come directly to me or, or you can email me@drdawnoctordon.net, it's just D R D a W n R D a W n dot net I always ask people if you are looking for a dentist or you have a question, just put up in the subject line, heard the podcast, have a question, watch the video, have a question and I promise I will get to you. I'm very good about answering my emails.

Yes, emails is the best way to reach out to Dr. Don. And once again I'm sure I would have Dr. Dawn come back on to our podcast for more information. But Dr. Don, thank you so much for your time today. And if you have any questions, send email to Dr. Donctordon.net and don't forget to subscribe to our podcast. And remember, there's always a reason to smile.

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