Mouth Piece 16 Rinsed (part 1)

I am nearing the end of my series about mouth care. I have tried to go through each aspect of the matter cautiously, laying out a sensible, balanced approach to oral care that costs neither money nor time, based on a mix of personal experiment and my reading of scientific evidence. Each stage in the argument, moderate in itself, has inched me towards a radical conclusion: that good oral health might be achievable without the help of the dental industry. I am not alone in proposing that idea, of course; but too many of those who propose such a thing strike me as offputtingly far out or faddy. I have tried instead to come over as hesitantly reasonable. Nonetheless, in these final two posts on the subject I intend to take leave of my objectivity and descend into an opinionated rant. So feel free to take what follows with a pinch of salt.

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When I look back at my dental history, I cannot help thinking some my dental problems were worsened or even caused by dental work itself. Obviously, I believe the blame for my tooth decay lay with my eating of sugary and processed products and my poor or ineffective tooth care and hygiene. Simply put: I ate sugar; plaque grew on my teeth; I did not clean it off properly; it caused damage. But I cannot look back on the remedies enacted on me by my dentists with anything but dismay.

My dad liked to share work back and forth between business associates. So the main dentist of my earlier years, Mr Jenkins, was a friend of his. I still have evidence along my back teeth of Mr Jenkins’s handiwork—rows of gnarly metal fillings. To be fair, as a metal worker, he was a craftsman, since most of his fillings remain in place now that I am sixty years old—though some did fall out, as I mentioned in an earlier post, when the bits of teeth to which they were fixed came away.

Mr Jenkins’s method of filling a tooth, I now see, was to drill a big hole in the tooth, which not only removed the tooth decay but a good portion of the healthy tooth around it, so he could establish purchase for a metal plug. Without such purchase, the filling might fall out. On close inspection, I notice that one of his techniques was to cut holes across the tooth to give a filling “claws”, as it were. This resembles the carpentry technique of dovetailing, which locks a joint in place. As a result, some of my back teeth contain more filling than tooth, and others come close. The scene looks worse where weakened areas of tooth have broken off, leaving the joint stuck out like shrapnel.

I read now that all this amalgam in my mouth is not only obsolete but potentially dangerous, because it releases a constant microscopic drip of mercury and other alien substances into my body. I looked into having the fillings removed. Not only would it be exceptionally expensive, but it seems the amount of metal released into the bloodstream during the process might be counterproductive. It is not as if the new types of filling that would replace the metal have a clean bill of health either. On the positive side, however, I am not too worried about the small amount of metal released by my fillings, since my healthy diet contains plenty of substances to detox the body of alien matter, for example by chelation. Thankfully, I do not suffer from the symptoms of those who believe their metal fillings are damaging their health.

Three of those back teeth filled by Mr Jenkins had to be removed due to abscesses—two when I was relatively young. Three more are highly damaged and have felt abscessy in the past, leading to refillings. Had I attended the dentist in the last fifteen years, I am sure those would have been removed by now too. And others refilled. Since I have not been to the dentist, none of that has happened. Fillings have come out or come away, leaving broken or hollow teeth that, on the basis of all we are told, should by now have caused me serious problems. They have not. Yes, they are broken, but they cause little trouble nowadays. Yes, they used to hurt sometimes, in the days when my diet was poor. And they were sensitive, when I was prone to tooth sensitivity. But now, presumably well protected by the healthy regrowth of dentin, they cause no problem and surprisingly little inconvenience. One is actually hollow. After its filling came out, I assumed food would get stuck in it all the time, but it rarely does. If it does, a touch of the pick, or a post-prandial chewing of gum plucks it out instantly.

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Methods of filling teeth have changed over the years. During my last period of dental attendance, the nineties, my dentists liked to jam a non-metal, cement-like substance into my teeth. That all came back out ages ago. From what I have read, those types of fillings—unlike Mr Jenkins’s metal constructions—are not designed to last. They have to be replaced every so often. At least they required less drilling. Their introduction coincided with the switch of my local dental services from free treatment on the National Health to private practice. It makes more sense for a private dentist to fill teeth less permanently, as it establishes the need for repeated work in future.

One notable difference between Mr Jenkins’s metal fillings and the work of the cement-packers was that the cement packers made no attempt to imitate the shape of my teeth. Whereas the tops of one’s back teeth are naturally uneven, so that teeth can bite, these modern dentists packed the cement across those grooves to leave a strangely flat surface. Over time, this would wear back to a more natural profile, but at first it felt odd because it desensitised the whole top of the tooth. In those days, I was impressed by the fact that a newly filled tooth was flatter than those around it; but now I think it questionable to lump anything on the teeth which alters their natural shape. Modern dentistry, however, seems determined to treat dental work rather as a cover-up job. Teeth are now replated, recoated, capped, and crowned as a matter of course. In my opinion, the cover-up principle is fatally flawed. Not only is it highly expensive, but teeth, in my opinion, fare better the more contact they have with healthy saliva. The last thing they need is to be shielded from it by dentists whose tool kit now resembles that of the plasterer as much as the carpenter.

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In fairness to old Jenkins, I do not remember much pain straight after he had filled my teeth. But on a couple of occasions, my later mottle and daub dentists filled a tooth only to make the pain worse. One time the filling had to be replaced and the tooth removed instead, a decision akin to shooting the horse because it was rubbing against a new fence. That was my biggest tooth. What I believe happened is that the dentist had jammed the cement so hard into the centre of the tooth that it was pressing on an exposed nerve within, leaving no room for dentin to regrow over the nerve and thereby soothe it.

By then I never seemed to see the same dentist twice. The practice I visited was part of a chain round the local towns that largely employed young locum dentists to do their work. I suppose you cannot blame the owners of the practice, now more businessmen than health workers, for taking as much time as possible away from personally dabbling in people’s mouths. But, interestingly, it meant that my dentists were happy to criticise each other’s work. On one occasion, a stand-in dentist decided to extract one of my teeth because it had become abscessed. He gaily told me that the abscess was caused by the previous filling. By then I had sufficient experience of dentists to make me cynical about the profession; but it was the first evidence that dentists had been harming my teeth. I remember a young Irish dentist I saw at university, whose method was to take photographs of the teeth. After studying a photograph for a moment, he discovered he was looking at it upside down. That incident suggested to me for the first time that dentistry is by no means the sophisticated profession we are led to believe.

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From my reading, I have come to see teeth as composed mostly of nerves, dentin, and pulp that are an intrinsic part of the body. The enamel surface alone is inorganic, the rest regrows. The beauty of a tooth as a piece of engineering is that it combines flexible and rigid parts, like a wheel suspension or a washing machine. But as soon as something presses tight against such a mechanism, it is constricted, leading to dysfunction and damage. So though enamel is a rigid material, as it must be to chew foods, it rests on a softer layer of dentin, which itself sits on an even softer layer of flesh. This degree of give helps teeth absorb impact. In addition, teeth are not uniformly shaped but have subtle indentations along their tops, plus curves on their fronts and backs, that disperse the impact of hard matter throughout their mass, meaning they do not break even when crunching the hardest of materials.

It stands to reason, therefore, that fixing much less flexible materials into the heart of the teeth, such as metals, amalgams, and cements, must reduce the ability of teeth to withstand impact over time. I can see the effect of this when I inspect the broken places in my teeth. There are now points in my mouth where the metal filling is left standing out like an ancient ruin, the shell of the tooth clinging around it. It is clear where bits of tooth have snapped away from the fillings. As I have said, I believe three of my teeth are, in effect, dead. By that I mean the tooth enamel has more or less lost contact with the dentinal structure that should support it and instead holds on in my mouth only by virtue of Mr Jenkins's fiendish metalwork system. In my experience, very small pieces of these teeth break off every so often (you think you have a piece of grit in your supper). What has happened, I believe, is that these teeth—in the absence of contact, at least in places, with dentin—became brittle with age. Supported only by metal, they lost the ability to resist hard force, and therefore they inevitably crack under pressure or trauma.

That is why these days—unintuitive though it sounds—I prefer to let my damaged teeth go unfilled. In the case of those still alive, it allows them to breathe and move freely, as they were designed to do, without having to cope with being plugged by a substance alien to the body and inimical to their organic design. In the case of my dead teeth, it saves them from a return to the filled state that killed them in the first place. Since to my great surprise it turns out that even damaged teeth help with chewing and cause no problem so long as they are fully washed by saliva, I would rather keep them as useful relics of what they once were than artificially shore them up with substances that will make them hurt again and advance the day of their extraction.

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It is not just the breaking of the teeth—admittedly a very rare phenomenon—that I want to avoid. I want to avoid the toothache and infection that dental work can cause. Fillings might work in the short term, if they are well done, but over time they inevitably loosen, opening fissures between them and the teeth into which bacteria can find a way. By this route, noxious fluids could penetrate the deeper parts of the teeth, promoting soreness, infection, and abscesses.

When I look back at my abscess extractions, I see a pattern. If you insert an inorganic plug into the tooth—which is what a filling is—it creates a greater risk of infection than if you left that tooth unfilled and allowed dentin to grow back and mend the damage or seal the surface of the broken area. I have found that when a small piece breaks off one of my teeth, I have toothache for several days, but that it slowly dies away—after which the tooth does not hurt any more. It is how nature’s healing process works in the rest of the body. At first, the broken tooth is exposed to the oral environment, for which the signal is pain from the exposed nerve. Then dentin comes to the rescue and seals the raw spot, in the same way that collagen is restored in skin and bone. Afterwards, the pain goes away because the nerve has done its job and now is sealed back in.

The tooth which caused me the most pain was the one that Mr Jenkins drilled hollow to ensure a neat, stable filling. After the filling fell out, I have had no further pain from that tooth. Nor is it inconvenient, to my surprise, having a hollow tooth in my mouth. (I forgive anyone who doubts me on that, but it is true.) Saliva now has a clear route into all parts of the tooth; and the lack of pressure means abscesses have no reason to form. When I had a piece of tooth break off along the gum line—as with a tooth at top right which backed shallowly into the gum—I felt a double pain, that of the tooth nerves and that of the inflammation where an area of gum was opened up, as in a cut. Both pains died away naturally over several days.

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It was a revelation for me. In the past, I would rush to the dentist with the tooth pains; the filling would be inserted; and, as the pain died away, I would attribute the relief to the filling rather than to the normal healing process that follows damage. Now I ask why—if I maintain a healthy pH in my mouth by avoiding sugar and processed food, and if I clean my teeth effectively so that plaque, tartar, and food particles do not build up—I would need dental check-ups or routine hygienist appointments. If I am right, it should be possible to avoid such expenditure entirely. Not only might this save me money, but it might save me from future damage caused by dental treatment.

By avoiding fillings, I avoid having healthy tooth structure weakened or removed by the drill; I avoid having inorganic substances plugged into gaps so the tooth cannot breathe properly, leading to blocked nerves, undrained inflammatory fluids from bacterial infections and abscesses, and friction of rigid matter against enamel that causes cracks, shearing, and breakages. And by avoiding the hygienist, I avoid having the natural film and outer enamel that protects my teeth scraped off leaving them more vulnerable to plaque and decay over time.