The Dental profession is becoming increasingly aware of the indivisibility of dental health and overall health. The teeth, the tongue, the gingiva, the lips, the salivary glands, etc, are all integrated with the rest of the body via the nerves, the blood and lymphatic circulation, glandular secretion, acupuncture meridians, the connecting bones and joints and by the digestive tube which extends from the mouth to the anus.
Because of the mechanical nature of most dental therapeutic procedures it may occasionally be convenient to forget that the mouth we are treating is connected to a vital, breathing, thinking, feeling human being. Yet the profound interrelationships between the mouth and the rest of the body have been recognized in the scientific literature of the West for several decades and by the Chinese for some fifty centuries.
When treating someone with an oral health problem, often the cause is found locally, such as a broken tooth due to trauma, a lost filling, or a sore spot from an ill-fitting denture, but more frequently the cause is found outside the mouth. This is particularly true of the more chronic oral maladies, such as periodontal disease, tempro mandibular joint (TMJ) disorders, oral cancer, bruxism, bad breath, herpes simplex, tooth decay and more recently, AIDS. Other common examples of this remote causation of oral pathology include the severe alveolar bone resorption from around the roots of the teeth in diabetic patient, and the gross proliferation of fibrous tissue of the gingiva in the epileptic patient receiving Dilantin therapy. Even the American Dental Association now recognizes this systemic causation of the periodontal disease. The Dentist is sought out for evaluation and treatment of these oral symptoms, despite the fact that these oral symptoms are merely a localized manifestation of a more systemic disturbance.
Perhaps less widely appreciated but, I maintain, more frequent in occurrence are those systemic maladies which result from oral sources, … such as constipation of the TMJ patient due to his impaired chewing ability, or the migraine headache of a mercury hyper-sensitive patient provoked by a mouthful of amalgam (50% mercury), or the abdominal rash of the nickel-hypersensitive person that just had a nickel crown placed on a tooth, In these cases, ironically, the patient traditionally must seek the treatment of a physician because of the systemic nature of illness despite their oral origins.
Consider that only few years ago it was fairly common “medical” treatment for rheumatoid arthritis to extract all the patient’s teeth–frequently with great success. One cannot soberly ignore the fact what we do in our dental treatment can profoundly affect that individual’s systemic health and vice versa. Once this concept is embraced, then the role of homeopathy in dentistry is much easier to appreciate.
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