The Evils of Gum Disease

A New Perspective on your “Gum Canyons”

Welcome to the Dental Fitness Weekly Newsletter v.0002; 1642 words; 7 minutes reading time

Last week’s newsletter was about tooth decay. If you thought that was bad, you’re in for a real treat this week.

Most dental problems in general result from not understanding the disease nature of decay and gum problems.

Yet, 80% of most common dental problems are EASY to prevent!

Think about this for a moment: It’s nearly ¼ of the way into the 21^st century, and dental problems are still a multi-billion dollar business in the USA, and growing despite being mostly preventable! You’d think we should have solved dental problems by now. Doggone it! It’ only two diseases for cryin’ out loud! It’s not like the rest of the body where thousands of things go wrong.

I’m waiting while you think…..

OK.

I believe I know some of why dental problems are still so common despite being easy to prevent:

• Dentistry is a business based on production, not prevention. That’s partly because it’s always been that way, and it’s hard to change it.
• It’s also partly because it’s easier and more quantifiable to pay for services of fixing things than to pay for prevention. For example, if you don’t have a problem, how do you know if it’s because you really prevented it, or it just never happened?
• At least if you actually do have a problem, and you have it fixed, you can quantify it, track it, pay for it, get a warranty, get insurance reimbursement, get a tax deduction, etc…
• Because of these dilemmas and the entrenched old systems, regular dentistry will probably remain a business mostly based on production. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying to prevent problems in the first place, and prevent failures of fixings.
• Most people don’t know that tooth decay and gum problems are infectious diseases.
• Most people don’t understand how the mouth affects the rest of the body, health-wise and disease-wise.
• Standard home oral hygiene instructions are outdated and ineffective for most people today with our obsessions for food that is fast, processed, junky, and sugary.

Here’s my approach to the second most common human affliction: dental problems.

1. First, I know that sugar and sweets do not directly cause dental problems. Tooth decay and gum disease are infectious microbial diseases caused by germs that attack you 24/7/365/Life. (Recall in the prior newsletter that in the absence of actual food, saliva and gingival crevicular fluid can feed dental pathogens just fine. Carbs, proteins, and amino acids that you eat are like icings on the cake.)
2. Because I know I’m fighting two main diseases, I have learned the disease processes:
   • Very simply, there are two basic types of dental germs:
     • Cavity germs (four bacteria and one fungus)
       • Aerobic (survive live in the presence of oxygen)
       • 2-layer cell wall (fairly easy to kill, somewhat dangerous occasionally)
     • Gum disease germs (at least 60 different strains, all bad [worse, worst, worst of the worst])
       • Anaerobic (cannot survive in the presence of oxygen)
       • 3-layer cell wall (extremely hard to kill, very dangerous, poisonous, toxic, stinky, gross, horrible, evil bastards)

Let’s stop here a moment.

Now that you know that sugar doesn’t directly cause dental problems, and that you (and everyone else -- and me too) are infected with dental disease germs that are always eating and attacking you, whether YOU eat or not, does it make any sense to do oral hygiene only twice a day?

Heck no!

So why does dentistry promote such a lame concept as standard home oral hygiene?

I guess it’s because it’s better than nothing. And it’s the least you can do. And THEY think you can’t understand the true nature of dental problems. And people always want the easiest things. And theoretically, avoiding sugar and sweets is okay advice, even if doesn't really work.

BUT THE STANDARD ORAL HYGIENE ADVICE IS NOT WORKING EITHER

Now that you know the microbial nature of dental problems, here are some easy things you can do to fight them:

1. Because decay and gum disease germs are constantly on the attack, you must attack back more than only twice a day.
2. Because dental disease germs come in at least three waves, you must always try to stop the 2^nd and 3^rd waves from starting.
3. You can almost never stop the first wave. I have tried for years, and after my recent oral microbiome test with BRISTLE, I discovered that I still had some gum disease germs in my mouth. HOWEVER, I control them so much they never get past the first wave. Note in my microbiome test results that my tooth decay germs are 0.2% (extremely low), but my gum disease germs are 2.1% (low, but I want to do better). This means to me that the gum disease germs are about 10 x harder to kill than the tooth decay germs. BUT, it also means that despite how nasty those gum disease buggers are, I’m doing a good job of keeping them under control with just my usual dental fitness methods. And, I haven’t had a professional hygienist dental cleaning since 2012!

Dr. Steve's Bristle Oral Microbiome Test Results Sept. 23, 2022

 

4. In my prior newsletter, I listed a number of easy things that you can do to fight tooth decay.

 

 

5. I want to add a few more items below:
   • Buy a Teledyne Waterpik WP560 right away. And use it twice a day. Or, at the very least, use it before you go to bed at night. This way, you’ll flush out many germs that would otherwise grow exponentially overnight.
   • 
   • Buy a trigger spray bottle and a bottle of 3% hydrogen peroxide from the grocery store.
   • Before using your Waterpik, add 4 squirts (1 tsp) of hydrogen peroxide into your Waterpik and then fill it up with water (1 cup). Since there are 48 tsp/cup, then your Waterpik will contain approximately 1 tsp hydrogen peroxide / 49 total tsp = about 2% of the 3% hydrogen peroxide, so that will be about only 0.061% hydrogen peroxide in the water. That’s not enough to burn your gums, but it’s enough to make life absolutely miserable for a while for the gum disease germs since they cannot survive in oxygen.
   • The patients in my office who have been using this method with the Waterpik WP560 have thanked me constantly for telling them this trick. They are saving $$ on dental cleanings and most importantly, they are fighting disease.
6. If you don’t floss, can’t floss, won’t floss, then at least you should but some Butler G.U.M. Softpicks to use between your teeth. Studies show that interdental cleaners can work almost as well as floss, and certainly better if you just don’t floss.

• 

 In summary,

I want you to understand the severity of dental problems in general, especially gum disease.

Your mouth holds at least 20 billion microbes at all times, even after teeth cleanings and oral hygiene. In fact, “hygiene” is a wrong name, because the mouth is rarely, if ever really “hygienic”. A better term is dental fitness.

Those 20 billion germs grow 100 billion every 24 hours, and about 70 billion of those germs grow while you sleep! The mouth is just a warm, moist, perfect incubator to grow germs all night, ESPECIALLY if you suffer dry mouth at night.

That’s why you must always do your dental fitness before bedtime – to slow those darn germs down.

And it’s another reason to use dental probiotics while you sleep. Especially, time-release dental probiotics that can grow exponentially overnight to fight dental germs.

 

Imagine your gums are the Grand Canyon.

Every millimeter is a mile in the microbial world.

Average gum depth in health is 3 millimeters. This means that to the microbes living in your mouth, the average gum crevices are 3 Grand Canyons deep!

Your manual toothbrush, floss, and picks can reach only 1.5 miles deep into your gum canyons.

A sonic brush can reach about 2.5 miles into your gum canyons.

A Waterpik WP560 can reach down to 6 miles into your gum canyons if you have 6 millimeter deep gums.

Now imagine how the Colorado River running through the Grand Canyon affects life in the southwestern United States. It's kind of like that with the gums. Your gums connect to the rest of your body through capillaries just like the water in the Grand Canyon irrigates the states and affects the states via power supply, etc.

This image below shows how gum disease toxins can cause inflammatory reactions that exacerbate COVID inflammation and cause a perfect storm of inflammatory cytokines.

 Lastly, this image below shows only a few ways the mouth affects the bodily systems.

 Now that I've gone through the basic education of cavities and gum disease, the following newsletters will focus more on tips and tricks to easily fight dental problems.

And if you want a jumpstart on those tips and tricks, you can find them in the links below.

Whenever you're ready, here are some ways I can help you, your family, and friends:
1. Improve your home oral hygiene with this free, downloadable, 22-page, PDF booklet: "7 Easy Steps to Start Supercharging Your Oral Hygiene Efforts".
2. Get my 58-page downloadable book "The RENUZORAL Method of Dental Fitness" for just $5.97 USD.
3. Visit my websites RENUORAL.com or Breathificdental.com and get any of the products I recommend
4. Enroll in my Oral-Systemic Health for Life Masterclass to create customized, effective dental fitness systems and take charge of your dental destiny once and for all. I will never sell your information, for any reason.

To our oral-systemic health!

Dr. Steve Edwards

 

PS

Next week’s newsletter will be about sensitive teeth.