From Your Mouth to Your Gut: Hearing Health Whisper

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I have a little sleep secret I want to tell you about. Look, sleep is crucial for your fitness, but it's crucial for just plain old everyday life and function. And I find I sleep great unless I have a migraine. And I've had more than my fair share since perimenopause all the way through postmenopause. My secret weapon was Blue Sky CBD sleep gels. Each gel contains 25mg of CBD and 25mg CBN for deep restorative sleep. Something about it helps to reduce inflammation, which I believe for me was key in helping me get to sleep. But the biggest thing is so many of the over-the-counter solutions, whether for sleep or migraines, can ruin gut health, and liver health. Neither one of those did I want to be problematic for me. So this option is recommended by healthcare providers worldwide and backed by thousands of happy customers, many of whom come from our Flipping 50 community. There is zero THC, so it's non-habit-forming. It's made by a trusted family-owned company that we all can feel good about. Third-party tested for purity and potency. And if you're interested, you too can try a sample for just $6. But even better, you can get 30% off forever with discount code FLIPPING50. That's FLIPPING50. Just go to flipping50.com/blueskycbd. We'll put that link in the show notes and you'll find it everywhere on Flipping 50 at My Favorites. What are you waiting for? Good night. Watch your mouth. Did your mom say that? I don't think mine ever did or had to. She might have said, I don't care who started it, I'm gonna stop it. And then my brother and I would look at each other and bust out laughing because we knew it wasn't true. But I digress. This one is all about your mouth, your teeth, your gums, and how it might be related to your gut health. So yes, if you're having gut health issues. Tune in, you don't want to miss this. I'm Debra Atkinson, and you're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond before you know to ask them. The goal to help accelerate your results with the science and the practical application of proven protocols. While living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman. It's not just you, but it's the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made for menopause and beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts behind the science of optimal hormone-balancing fitness and longevity and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy you want, need, and deserve. This episode is one you are going to want to listen to. Look, we all go to the dentist at some point. You may not love the dentist, you— maybe you actually, because I know a lot of people who like to go. They get glowing reports all the time, and they love getting their teeth cleaned because it feels great. And yet there may be something that you don't know about what lives in your mouth that could actually be impacting you, your hormones, your gut health, and every cell in your body. And we really go there, and that may sound like a broad topic and a very big promise, but I will promise you that my guest today delivers. She is not the first biological dentist that I've had as a guest on the show, but she is the first who dove into this topic in the way we do today. And I think that you will have a much better idea of how maybe some puzzling symptom that you can't quite figure out may be related to the health in your mouth. So my guest today is Dr. Michelle Jorgensen. She's a former traditional dentist turned holistic health pioneer who helps exhausted, health-conscious people feel like themselves again by starting where health actually begins—your cells. She's the founder of Living Well with Dr. Michelle and author of the upcoming book—actually, it's published now—by the same name, which reveals how to decode your symptoms and give your body exactly what it needs to heal, thrive, and stay energized without the fads, the overwhelm, or the guesswork. If you're tired of chasing health trends and still not feeling better, this conversation is for you. And I don't know about you, and I maybe shouldn't say this, but I'm going to, that she's one of us. So she's a woman in midlife as well, and she understands the gut and the importance of gut and hormones and the connection and where we all may be just a bit right now. So I think you're gonna love this episode, and I think this also will be one that you may want to share. Dr. Michelle Jorgensen, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, I'm excited to be here today. All right, so we like to know the dirt here between everybody's history.

What was it about dentistry that pulled you in? Way back when?

Yeah, that pulled me in and almost spit me out also. And rinse and spit. Okay, exactly. So, I am— my dad is a dentist, so we are just kind of a dental family. I actually have 3 younger brothers that followed me into dentistry as well. And that's really just where I thought I was always going to stay, was inside of, you know, was as a dentist. And my father is still practicing in his mid-70s. He just doesn't ever want to give this up. And I thought I would just kind of continue on like he did for, you know, years and years and years. But that's actually not how my story played out. So that is definitely— I've definitely taken a different track than he has.

Okay, so talk to me. So when you say spit me out, what's, what's the story behind that?

Yeah, it's actual literal. So about a decade into practice, I started getting really sick.. And I didn't know what it was. And so I just started doing what everybody does. You know, my first issues were gut health problems. So when you have gut problems, you just throw away all your food, right? You know, we threw away everything in all of our cupboards and boxes and packages and started eating better. And it helped a little bit, but not a lot. And the other symptoms that just weren't going away and changing is memory problems. I've always had a really good memory, but I stopped being able to even complete sentences or remember a patient's name from room to room. So I mean, this was, this was drastic, but the big one was numbness. I had numbness down my hands and arms. I couldn't sleep at night. I couldn't blow dry my hair, and I got to the point that I actually couldn't even hold my dental instruments. So something was drastically wrong and no doctor could tell me what it was. I was literally seeing chiropractors 2 and 3 times a week and massages twice a week and had had orthopedists look at this and doctor after doctor after doctor, and nobody could tell me anything was wrong. And finally, I put my practice for sale. So, I was in my, you know, late 30s, 4 young kids. This was the entire livelihood for our household. My husband worked for the practice as well. So, this was really— this was, yeah, dentistry spitting me back out here, and I'm not being able to continue practicing. And finally, I was looking into being a nutritionist in a dental practice or something of this sort. I thought, well, I can't actually hold an instrument, but maybe I can still talk to people. And along that journey, another dentist said, have you ever looked into mercury poisoning as a possible solution? Because your symptoms sound a lot like mine. That was the first time anybody had ever said that to me. And I said, well, no, I don't have any fillings. I knew that silver fillings have mercury in them. I said, well, I don't have any fillings. And they said, no, it's not the fillings you have. It's the ones you've been drilling out for the last decade without any protection. And I had been taught in school that if I talked to anybody that told anyone that mercury could affect their health, mercury in their fillings could affect their health, and getting them out would be good for them, any of that, that I would actually lose my license. So that's all I had to go on is that this isn't dangerous, and if you even tread, you know, softly down that path, you're going to lose your license, so don't go there. But I got tested. I thought, well, I have nothing to lose at this point. I have everything to lose if I don't find the answer. And I got tested and that's what it was, mercury toxicity off the charts. So, my doctor said, "All right, you have got to be able to get better. You can't keep putting it in. You can't keep doing what you've been doing if you're gonna actually get it out as well. So, if you wanna continue being a dentist, you gotta figure something else out." And I found there were organizations that actually had protocol for how to remove these fillings in a safe way so that it wasn't exposing the patient or the practitioner to these high levels of mercury. Started doing that. Patients started noticing. I mean, when your doctor walks in in like a hazmat suit for the procedure, you know something's going on. So they started paying attention, asking questions, but they were all very receptive and interested, saying, well, well, this is good for me too, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, this is very good for you. And then started asking deeper questions like, well, I've heard some controversy around fluoride. What do you think about that? And what do you think about root canals? Like, I've heard there's issues maybe with them. You know, having infection, what do you think about that? And I didn't know anything about anything, so I had to start learning to be able to answer my patients' questions because I'm a question asker myself, you know. If I don't know the answer, I'm gonna go find it. And what I found completely changed my path, my trajectory inside of dentistry, my practice. Now I have a multi-specialty practice. People come to us from around the world to get chronic health diseases answered, and it is never anything that I intended to do, never where I thought my practice and my career would go. So it's definitely been an interesting journey. Amazing.

And so I'm, I'm going to be remiss if I don't ask you right now because everybody's wondering, where are you? I am in Utah. Okay, so not a place to— bad place to have to visit if anybody's thinking that. Okay, I just wanted to lay this out there. Okay.

Yes, but we also do— I do train other dentists, and I have a directory on my website because that's the most common question I get is, how do I find a dentist just like you? Yeah, we have a directory on our website, livingwellwithdrmichelle.com, where you can go for free and find a dentist that I have vetted and, you know, found that will do some of the similar things.

And so while we're here, we just kind of dripped this little piece out. Let's, let's go into root canals because I, I recently went through this. So a little over a year ago, I experienced— okay, I chewing a piece of gum, I broke a tooth, and all of a sudden I'm in this downward spiral of, well, you know, asking a friend, who's your dentist here? Because I suddenly have need, like, right away. And so I go to an old family friend of theirs and then have to walk down this delicate path of I'm surrounded by too many friends who know too much, I know too much, I can't do this. And it's like, but I don't know what I do need to know. And I was like, oh heck no, you're not gonna do that. But talk about root canals, the whole— what is the difference, you know, between the way you were originally trained and what your belief is now?

Yeah, there's a huge difference. But it's interesting because it all goes back to just tooth anatomy, which, you know, a dentist learned first year of dental school. We learned how a tooth was made and the way that a tooth works. Well, even back up a step further. So let's say that a dentist tells you you need a root canal. First of all, I do that in quotation marks because nobody needs a root canal. You can survive actually without your tooth. Lots of people do. And so you don't need anything, you know, you don't need a root canal. But if you were told you need a root canal. That usually means is that you have a cavity or a break in your situation, you know, a broken area that extends to or near the nerve of the tooth. The nerve of the tooth is in the center of the tooth. That nerve is housed in a canal, so that's why it's called the root canal, because there's this canal that goes from the center of the top part that you see down through each of the roots. So when they do a root canal— when I— I've done hundreds of them myself, earlier years. What we do as a dentist is we clean out the nerve and the blood vessels on the inside of the tooth, fill it up, disinfect it with bleach. Actually, it's still used. That's still what we use to disinfect these. Disinfect it with bleach and then fill it up with like a plastic-like material. So the idea is awesome. You get to keep your tooth in your head, you keep chewing with it, you keep smiling with it. I mean, it's great, right? The problem is, is that's not all that happens inside of the tooth. There is the main chamber or canal that houses this, but there's little feeder channels that go off of it. That's how when you tap on your tooth, you can feel it, right? Because there's little nerve extensions that go from the main center canal all the way out to the outside of the tooth. They're called little dentinal tubules. And again, every dentist learns this first year of dental school. This is not anything fancy or special. Um, each of those little tiny tubes houses blood vessel tissue, nerve tissue, and they're too small to clean and too small to fill. So now, you've cut off the supply that the body has to get immune cells or blood vessel or blood cells or nutrients or anything to the tooth. You've sealed it off with this plastic-like material, but there's still dead tissue in the tooth. It's impossible to get all of it out. So now, you've entombed dead tissue inside of this tooth and left it in your jawbone. Well, anytime there's dead stuff in the body, it's gonna attract bacteria. I always joke and say, let's say you had a gallbladder attack and the doctor says, let's take take your gallbladder out? They take it out, clean it up, disinfect it with some bleach, fill it full of plastic stuff, and shove it back in you. They would never do it. Why would they never— not sound like a good idea. No, because it's been cut off from the blood supply, from the immune supply, you know, all these things that there's no way to keep that healthy. And that's what happens with the tooth as well, is now there is dead tissue in the tooth. Bacteria always find it. So what this does is it asks the body to constantly be fighting this chronic low-grade infection. To deal with this thing, these bacteria that are growing and building up over here. And sometimes the body can do it. They keep— they can take care of it okay, but at what cost? Hmm. Now the immune system is distracted, it's tired, it's confused, it's always fighting. And so this is the connection we see between root canals and autoimmune disease and chronic disease like heart disease and cancer and strokes. In fact, research shows that if you have one root canal, your incidence of cancer increases by 1.5 times. If you have one root canal, your increase for strokes increases by 3 times. I mean, it's just massive, the effect that this low-grade, long-term, never-goes-away infection has on the body's ability to take care of itself. So that's the truth about root canals.

Wow, that's pretty amazing. And now I want to kind of back up. So your gut issues. And, uh, every woman here can— I'm saying, going out on a limb saying every, but there's an anomaly if there's a woman here listening who doesn't have gut issues that she didn't have prior to hormonal changes. It's so very common. And yet, you know, we've all gone through detoxes or gut cleansing protocols, elimination diets you alluded to, you know, And yet your premise is there is a mouth-gut axis that we actually need to take care of the mouth first.

Can you explain that? Yes, 100% over. You're exactly right on, because what happens is there's 3 sources of hidden infection in the mouth. So one is gum disease, and gum disease affects about 85% of adults in the United States. So that means 85% of the listeners that are listening right now probably have some degree of gum disease. Now, does gum disease incidence increase with hormone changes? It actually does. And the reason is our bodies are, well, particularly estrogen changes, because as estrogen drops, everything dries out, including gum tissues, which gum tissues need constant saliva, constant cleansing, constant kind of lubrication to keep everything healthy and well. All the bugs washed away. So most likely there's a gum disease component, but also these hidden infections in the root canals, but also in areas where teeth were removed. And a lot of times people will push back and say, well, I've never had a tooth taken out. Did you have your wisdom teeth taken out? Most everybody does. So where we've now found these is we do— we take a special scan called a cone beam CT scan, and it's a special x-ray that shows everything in the head and neck in 3 dimensions. So I can see, do you have a failed root canal? And I can't see these on just regular old dental X-rays. I will always remember the lady that I found this out on. Took a regular dental X-ray because she had a root canal. She was like, you know, it just didn't hurt, but it just feels weird. So we took a regular dental X-ray. I looked at it and I said, it looks just fine. Every dentist would have said it just looks fine, but I had just gotten this new cone beam CT scan machine in my office, and I said, you know what, for the heck of it, let's just take a scan. We took a scan, and I could not believe what I found. A quarter-size hole was eaten in her jawbone above the end of that root canal from infection that I could not see on my regular dental x-ray. Could not see it. So I can't see these infections without this kind of scan. I can't see an area where your wisdom teeth were removed that didn't heal properly, which is very common and affects hormone health immensely. All sorts of hormone regulation, fatigue regulation, even things like fertility rates are affected with infection in these wisdom teeth areas. So, we have to find them. So, when we're battling things like gut issues, we have to step back and say, "Okay, I've changed my diet. I've worked on my gut lining. I've, you know, done all of these things, my absorption. I've done everything. Why are things not regulating?" Well, it very likely may be because there is an infection in the body somewhere that is not allowing the rest of you to operate as it should. So, you get microbiome imbalances in the gut, in the mouth, they're all connected. The mouth was just the starting point of the gut. So, it is the gut. It's just the first place that food arrives. So, if there's infection here, your gut simply cannot work or be well.

It just can't. Wow. So I want to rephrase something. So if I understand correctly, we could be suffering from wisdom teeth we had out decades ago. There could be something there that we just don't know is actually the cause of this gut issue. Correct.

We see so many things related to those. In fact, I just, just this weekend I had a woman talking to me about her daughter that had come to see us We'd found these areas in her jawbone that hadn't healed properly. She had had allergies that were escalating, like it was getting to the point where she could eat like 5 foods safely without pain. Her gut issues were so drastic, and they had done everything. And she just had this thought, I need to go see Michelle. She's actually a friend of mine. She— and she thought, why should my daughter see Michelle? She's a dentist. This is so weird. But she didn't know what I did. And so she reached out. I said, uh, we need a cone beam CT scan. We found these infections. Her daughter got them cleaned out. I haven't seen her in about 2 years. And she said, I've got to tell you my daughter's story. She said since she got those cleaned out in your office, all of a sudden all the allergies started dropping off. She said the only one she has now is gluten. And I said, well, that's probably more than just infection in your mouth. It's probably the way that wheat grows nowadays. So it's, you know, I don't know that we're going to be able to tackle that one. But she said that's the only one she has left. And she says she's actually expecting. She was never able to get pregnant before. So those are the kinds of things that people think, What? My wisdom teeth? Yeah, it can be fatigue. It could be sleep levels. It could be adrenal exhaustion. It could be stomach issues, all because the body is so exhausted dealing with low-grade chronic inflammatory conditions stuck in these wisdom teeth areas that just basically don't allow the body to function as it should.

Wow. Okay, that's a lot to absorb. Backing, backing up. So for listeners, I want to say that this is almost like— I think we've evolved, we've come a long way. At one point, functional medicine was like, what is that? Who is that? I think so many of us now have a better handle on what that is, and that maybe that's a greater help with hormonal issues or hormone replacement when you're at that point, you're considering that. If I could provide an analogy, you tell me if I'm totally wrong, but I think of you as, okay, you're a functional dentist. You're, you're more of a new wave. You're considering so many more things and parts and not just the traditional trained doctor. Now you put it in words. You do now, you do that, do it justice. But what is the primary difference between somebody who's functionally trained and who is a biological dentist and Does somebody who does what you do, do they also generally have traditional training? They've, they've gone through the whole route. Do you have a question for a podcast? A question you'd love to ask, or maybe a story you want to tell? Did you know we have a special group just for podcast question roundups and the answers? My community coaches and I provide answers daily inside of this group, but it's also where I go when I occasionally say, okay, okay, open call for podcast questions or tell your story. Would you like to be a guest? So if you're looking for a community of women who are also interested in optimizing their health, strengthening their mindset, and looking forward to every new year, join the Flipping 50 Insiders group. That's Flipping 50 Insiders on Facebook.

Yes, because there is no there is no way to become a dentist without learning the traditional ways. Like, that is the only thing you're going to learn in school. You're not going to learn anything that I just shared with you in school. That's going to be something that you learn after. And, you know, the analogy of like a functional medicine practitioner is accurate for sure. You know, when you typically go to the dentist, there's this lifespan of a tooth, we'd like to joke, or the typical dental experience. You go to the dentist for your cleaning, right? You go, you get your teeth cleaned, you get x-rays, the dentist comes in, spends 5 minutes, pokes around a little bit, tells you you have a cavity here, or you need this crown, or whatever it might be, walks out, you go up, you schedule it, you come back a few weeks later, you get it taken care of, and you start it all over again. But did anyone ever talk to you about why you got that cavity, or why did your tooth break, or what is the material that we're actually going to be using to replace this, and what is that going to do to you? And what are options to be able to make it so that you never have to have another cavity again in your whole life? And oh, look, your gums are really red and swollen, and this really relates to your hormone health. How can we actually support you with your hormone health right here in our dental office? There's so much more to it. And dentistry, as we're taught in school, is mechanics. It's mechanic jobs. All we do is we fill holes. We're just plugging holes with things. We're just like a mechanic, you know, fixing a car. But the kind of dentistry that I do says We kind of forgot that the mouth was attached to the rest of us. And not only that, but there's really, really compelling research showing that 60 to 80% of chronic disease either starts in the mouth or is related to the mouth in one way. So really, I view dentists as the quarterbacks. We are actually the ones that can see things. Like, people can see your skin, but we can't see your bones. We can't see your stomach. We can't see your intestines or your kidneys or your ovaries. Like, we can't see them. But I can see your teeth and I can see your gums and I can see your tongue and I can see your throat and your tonsils. And they tell me so much about what's actually going on in the rest of you. So I view the mouth as the dashboard of the body. Dentists should be able to look in this, look in your mouth and say, ah, you've got that going on. I mean, I can look where you get cavities. If you, if you're getting cavities, I can look at where your cavities are and tell you what's going on with your gut just based on where they are in the mouth. That's the kind of thing that this kind of dentistry does. It connects the mouth to the rest of you and says, how does the mouth affect your overall health? And there is so much here.

Wow. Just holistic. I love that. Okay. And you say this, I say this too, that symptoms are not the enemy, they're the answer. They're leaving clues. So what could oral symptoms like cavities, jaw pain, be telling somebody about deeper issues with specific specifics in terms of digestion, hormones, immune system. It seems to me like it's almost like, um, I'm losing the word. Like, what is it when they do foot massage and everything is zoning? And yeah, yes. And it's tied to, oh, that, that goes directly to this. I feel like you're opening up the mouth and you're looking at, oh, we know that, we know what's going on with her. Tell me, give me an example if you can.

Yeah, so it's interesting that you use the example of foot zoning because there's actually the representation of every organ system in the body in 4 different places. One is the foot, one is the hands. So there's, there's what we call meridian outlets or, you know, basically charging, charging ports on the hands, on the feet, on the ears, and in the teeth. Every organ system is connected. And if you think about it, think about how much powering up or or activity happens with the feet, with the hands, with the teeth. Every single time you swallow, you're putting your teeth together. You're basically recharging everything. The ears, I haven't quite figured out. I'm guessing it's like wind blowing through our hair or something, you know, activating your ears. But every single organ system is connected. So, this goes two ways. So, one way it goes is, for example, if you come in and I see cavities along the gum line, what I tell you, what I can tell immediately is you have gut absorption issues. Your gut is not absorbing properly. So, I will give you what we call the baking soda test. You take it home, you test, and you say, "Okay. Yep. You're right. My stomach acid is low. I'm not absorbing minerals properly. I can tell that just by where on the teeth the cavities are." So, that is one thing. That's one direction. But the opposite direction as well is sometimes I can see if there's issues here it really alerts me to bigger issues in the body elsewhere and vice versa. Issues in the body will cause issues in the teeth. So, one of the most interesting examples I have is a gentleman who I saw him as a new patient. And when I walked in, I noticed he was kind of orange, like orangish colored. And I thought, this is odd. How do I bring this up in conversation? You know, and eventually, you know, a few minutes into talk, and I just said, you know what, I just have to ask, you just look very orange. And he said, everybody tells me. They ask me if I use self-tanner lotion, but I don't. I have no idea why I look orange. Well, we took this cone beam CT scan and looked to see he had 4 infected root canal teeth right across the front. Guess which teeth are connected to the liver? Wow. 4 front teeth. Oh my gosh. So now he has orange skin and has— he had had this, I believe, for 7 years. He'd been orange because he had knocked these teeth in an accident on trampoline. And killed all 4 of them. He had infected root canals across all of these. So his liver was not able to function properly because of the infection on those teeth that was connected. To make it very short, basically, every tooth is connected like through a wiring system, like in our home, how, you know, there's a light switch that connects to the light and the outlet. And that's the way that teeth connect to organ systems as well. He'd had a short on that line, and the liver wasn't able to function as well as it should. So a lot of times I can even look at people and say, something's going on here with your liver, something, you know, and we can put the pieces together as why you've really been struggling with health and wellness and why you were doing everything right and you still can't seem to get over the hump. In that situation, go check out your mouth. We have so many patients that come from doctors that say, we've done everything right for this patient, like they're following everything we've recommended, and we just can't seem to get over the hump, go see the dentist. They come, we find the absolute missing piece. We had a lady who had cholesterol out the roof. She was doing everything perfectly. She came, we found 3 infected root canal teeth. I saw her later because she brought her husband back for a new patient visit, and she said, I have to tell you the result. She said, I got those 3 teeth out, and I got my cholesterol tested the next week, and it went down 90 points. And that's all I changed was those infected teeth. So the body is connected head to toe, and there's so many things that the mouth can influence.

That is amazing. I'm going to ask you a really tough question. Okay, bring it on. Potentially unfair, but I think that this is something that a listener might be, might be going through in her own head. A lot of times what you do is not covered by insurance. A lot of people who need you and may think, I think I need you, may have prohibitory reasons they can't see you. What, what do you recommend?

Yeah, and this is a challenge and something that I talk about and deal with all the time. So one of the things that is expensive is removing infected teeth and replacing them. So what I always tell people is The key is to get your body to a place where it can keep itself well. I actually have a new book out that's all about that. It's about how does the body stay well. And the interesting thing is the body has the ability to stay well if we give it what it needs to do its job. That's really the whole premise of this, and it's true. So when I'm looking at someone and they have limited resources, I say, all right, what is the minimal that you can do to give your body the ability to do its own job? To do what it knows how to do, and the key is infection removal. So even if you cannot replace infected teeth, I encourage you to get them removed. And I know, and like, as a dentist, my training was save every tooth, and I used to say I'll save any tooth at any cost, and now I say I save your health at any cost, even if it means removing a tooth, because I can replace a tooth, and honestly, you can live without a tooth too. So if that's the difference between health and wellness, is that tooth, get it out. Even if you can't afford to replace it right now, don't wait to remove this— the sliver in the finger just because you can't put, you know, because you can't replace what's missing once you've removed it. Don't wait to get the infection out just because you can't afford to replace it yet. There's lots of ways to replace it. There's removable things you can do. There's all kinds of things that are much less expensive. Don't wait on the infection just because you can't afford the fix yet, if that makes sense.

That was so great. Yes, thank you for answering that. And I think you kind of gave a lot of people an answer to a question that they would have had otherwise. So in your new book, In Living Well with Dr. Michelle— very nice alliteration, by the way— you introduced the CellWell model. How does oral health fit into that model? What happens at the cellular level when we ignore our mouths?

You know, it fits in so many ways because what I teach is that there's 4 things every cell needs. And if you can figure out what to keep, how to keep one cell well, you keep them all well. So they need supplies, which is a lot of what you speak about. You know, it's food, it's diet, it's how we, you know, what do we give them? They need support, which is also some of what you talk about with exercise and how do we care for our bodies and get our bodies moving and help them dump their garbage. It's security. Which means protecting them from infections but also toxins in the world, all those things. And it is signals, which is largely dependent on oxygen. Our cells have to be able to talk with one another, and they have to be able to get the energy they need, and that needs a lot of oxygen. So dentistry affects every single one of those buckets, basically, but is hugely related to the security. Because if you have metals that are releasing mercury 24/7, you know, metal fillings in your mouth and releasing mercury 24/7, your cells aren't aren't secure and they can't stay well. If you have infections in your mouth that are constantly overacting your immune system, you can't stay well. If you are not— if you have swelling in here because of infection, or if you have too small of a mouth because somebody took teeth out for you for to do your braces, oh my gosh, then you can't get enough oxygen for your cells to talk to each other well enough. There's so many connections with dentistry that have to do with how every cell functions. So, in the book, I encourage, you know, if people are feeling overwhelmed, "Oh my gosh, there's so much here," go to the book. It actually walks you through very simply how to identify, first of all, what are your symptoms telling you. I have an assessment in the book that you take, you plug your symptoms into it, and it tells you which cells need help first. And then, I tell you, "Okay, this is the starting point. These are the cells that need your help first. It's your kidney. Yep, your kidney is the one that needs it." This is what you give your kidney from a food standpoint, from a movement standpoint, just to walk you simply through the answers. Because honestly, today's world, we're not lacking in information, we're lacking in clarity. We just don't know how to wade through all the information. And I just dumped a whole more— whole big old bucket on top of all of you of more, you know. I just added to the confusion. Thanks so much. What my book is all about is how to wade through through all the information and simplify it down to, what do I do tomorrow?

Yeah. And that, that lack of clarity means we'll sit in the middle of the room and spin as opposed to take action. Yes. So great. And you also, in the book, you talk about seasons, you know. So can you explain how somebody's season— and what you mean specifically by season of life? Do you just mean like we're in the fall, winter of our life, or something else? How does the season influence the way that they care for their mouth, or potentially, and how oral symptoms actually help reveal what season someone's in. Yep.

So the symptoms, it's interesting where I got this methodology. People will say, oh, you come up with a new classification system. Nope, I did not. What I did is I went to Chinese traditional medicine and Ayurveda from India and German herbalism and Korean medicine, and I pulled all of them together and said, what similarities do all of these old methodologies have? They all talked about seasons. Isn't that interesting? And they all talked about elements of the earth. So, I looked at all of them and I said, "Let's make sense of this. Let's just put it all together." So, the symptoms assessment you take, you just, you know, click, "Yes, I have this. Yes, I have this. Yes, I have this." It's going to come back and give you a season. It's not necessarily a season of life, although there's seasons that work that way too. I'm currently in a winter season. I'm regenerating after this book launch. I'm needing to rebuild all my resources before I go and birth something new. Spring again. But, um, these seasons are based on the body. Every body goes through, basically cycles through, what systems need help at what time. So if your symptoms are saying, I'm bloated, I'm just kind of exhausted, I can't get myself out of bed in the morning, I have no motivation, most likely you're actually in a spring season and you need to give your liver and your gallbladder extra care. So it identifies your season, the body, your season season's currently in and says, these are the cells that need help, and this is what you're going to give them. And interestingly enough, it tracks right along with the seasons of the earth. So if your body's in a spring season— again, this came from Chinese medicine— if your body's in a spring season, it's the liver and gallbladder that need help. The things that grow in spring feed the liver and gallbladder. Dandelions, spring greens, radishes, green onions— those are all things that are actually extremely good for liver and gallbladder. Isn't that cool? People figured it out like thousands of years ago. I just love this stuff. So it just gives you a guide to know where to start because we can't fix everything all at once. There's just no way to do it. We're too confused and a confused person cannot take a step forward. Like you said, they just sit in the middle of the room and spin. So this just tells you this is the season your body is currently in and it's going to keep cycling through But right now, these are the cells that need you now.

So love this. Okay, listeners, so this could be the missing book on your shelf when you're trying to figure out and you feel like you've done all the things. And I know we use that term so very often, but for so many of you, I know it's true. I know you're ticking the boxes and you're doing the things and you're even trying to listen and back off or go forward at the right time. But I I don't know about you, but right now I typed into my show notes here my niece and my, you know, nephew and other people. I'm like, oh my gosh, this might be something they haven't looked at yet. So you know somebody, you're the gatekeeper and the influencer of so many. If not for you, for them. Michelle, please tell us where can they find you, find the book?

Yes. So Living Well with Dr. Michelle is not only the name of the book, but it's also my website. It was the name of the website first. The publisher just liked the name and named the book that too. So Living Well with Dr. Michelle, please go there because you're gonna find all sorts of free stuff. You don't even have to buy anything, you know, go on there. I am on, on YouTube. I've got a ton of videos about all the things I talked about. I have free guides you can get, so just get on there, check it out. Also, the dental office is called Total Care Dental, so totalcaredental.com. You can check that out if you're looking for a dentist like, you know, doing the things that I'm doing, again, go to livingwealthdrmichelle.com. I have a dentist directory on there of dentists who have been vetted, and I know that they do at least some of what I do. So go on there, and for free you can see a dentist directory based on where you are geographically.

So great. Thank you so much for being here. You shed so much light on this, and we will link to other episodes with biological dentists because I think that we just went somewhere we not been before, listeners. But if we just open something up and your curiosity is piqued, it is definitely worth exploring. Thanks again, Dr. Michelle. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. To listen and access a decade of episodes and the show notes, visit Flipping50.com where you'll be able to find all of our prior episodes. And I made it easy for you to make the most of your listening time by selecting 5 specific areas most commonly high priorities for our community and giving you top 10 lists if you let me know you'd love them. If you know a midlife woman or a soon-to-be one who wants to optimize her midlife energy and time with the right exercise and lifestyle changes and a mind mindset shift about just what is possible, share this podcast with her, and I thank you. There is no more powerful health influencer in the world than you, midlife woman.