Evidence shows that oral bacteria is present in the plaques in heart attack victims. In this episode, Dr. Rachaele Carver explains the connection between oral health and disease. Dr. Rachaele is a biological dentist and a certified health coach who practices integrative whole body dentistry focusing on the root cause of dental disease. She talks with Dr. Lauren Lattanza about how as much as 80% of diseases can start in the mouth. The question is, what can we do to maintain oral health and drastically decrease disease in our whole body? Tune in!
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Biologic Dentistry: Dr. Rachaele Carver Explains The Connection Between Oral Health And Disease
Welcome to another episode of the show. We’re always working to bring you different approaches to holistic health and how you can get to your 100-year heart. In this episode, we are talking to Dr. Rachaele Carver. She graduated from UCONN School of Dental Medicine in 2003. After residency, she spent a few years in Boston and then backed her practice in Western Massachusetts in 2009. Since experiencing her health issues in 2011 and finding that traditional medicine didn’t have the answers, she began studying functional medicine and dentistry.
She received advanced training in occlusion and TMJ treatment, ozone therapy, energy medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, and Chinese medicine. In 2015, she became a certified Health Coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and in 2020 became a board-certified biologic dentist. She practices integrative Whole-Body Dentistry focusing on the root cause of dental disease. Her goal is to educate her patients and practitioners alike to recognize the causes of oral disease and implement preventative strategies. Welcome, Dr. Carver.
Thank you for having me.
We’re so fortunate to have you here. I was lucky to hear you speak back in October at ECO 2021. I know that you piqued a lot of interest from everybody that was there in the audience. I know that you’ve got so much wisdom to share. This Biologic Dentistry piece ought to be more of the commonplace in the holistic approach to medicine.
It’s the one thing that is most overlooked when we’re trying to figure out what is happening in the body and why do we have these symptoms. Unfortunately, in modern medicine, we have divided the body up into all these different body parts, and we’ve forgotten that it is one whole body and that when something is going on in the mouth, it may be affecting the heart and vice versa, so I ended up studying about the microbiome. We would talk about the gut all the time, but then we’ve got the oral microbiome. It’s a little bit of the chicken and the egg. Is it the gut microbiome that is causing the oral microbiome to go out of whack or vice versa?
I don’t think it matters so much, but it does matter that we address both issues because it’s pretty well-established in functional medicine now that microbiome is what’s determining our health, and when that goes out of balance, then we tend to see the different consequences of the disease. There are a lot of people out there talking about how 80% of diseases can start in the mouth. That’s where we need to look. Are there root canals that could be problematic?
Are there extraction sites that didn’t heal properly? Are there a lot of different heavy metals? That’s something that I certainly didn’t learn in dental school. If you have a gold crown next to a silver filling, silver filling creates current. Our whole being is electric, and if we have these other currents happening in the mouth, that could be contributing to some arrhythmia or different incoherent electrical signals in the body.
There’s a lot of stuff that goes on the mouth. A lot of it doesn’t hurt, and that’s why we don’t think to look in the mouth. We’re always looking at where’s your symptom, like, “You have a hurt thumb, then there must be a problem in your thumb.” What I’ve come to learn over the last few years is that because of this complex fascial system or meridian system in the body that just because you have a symptom in one place, sometimes, we’ve got to look elsewhere. What is that connected to? We’ve got to treat the body as a whole. I came back from training in craniosacral fascial therapy, and that was fascinating.
They had dissected a tongue, and that tongue is connected all the way to the little toe by fascia. If you have poor tongue posture or a tongue-tie, that’s going to affect everything. I noticed that in a lot of my practice. My patients’ bite would be off, and I’m looking at what’s going on with their joints. In traditional dentistry, we’d make them splints, and we try to do all these kinds of things, but it’s more than that.
I noticed when I would adjust people’s bites, there would be a small percentage that didn’t get them better, and then I started looking at the neck, the shoulders, their posture, and realizing this whole thing was messed up. That’s when I started using Prolozone therapy, which is an amazing therapy where you are using procaine, which is a mild anesthetic with some homeopathic anti-inflammatories, and using that along in the musculature and then following that up with ozone.
The profound anti-inflammatory and muscle relaxation also help drain all the lactic acid. We’ll put a lymph-draining thing in there. Many people have fibromyalgia or that chronic low-grade pain, and a lot of that is that lactic acid buildup because we’ve got inflammation or trauma, and the body is not able to remove that. The body doesn’t drain that very well. I’ve had so many patients where they’ve had surgery after surgery and this drug and that drug, then they have one Prolozone treatment, and they’re cured, and there’s zero side effects or contraindications. It doesn’t get better than that.
You’re encouraging the body to heal itself.
Exactly, and that is the point of view I’m coming from with my patients. Dental disease is not normal. It’s common, but it’s not normal. If you go back and look at the caveman, they had perfectly straight teeth. They didn’t ever have cavities. They didn’t have toothbrushes, but they ate a proper diet that their bodies were designed to eat. They didn’t have all these toxins and all this processed food in the world. They developed naturally and normally. In our very toxic world, we have to spend a little bit more time and be a little more thoughtful of what we’re putting in our body, how to bind up the things that we can’t necessarily prevent coming into us.
As you said with root canals and with implants, some of these things are already in a diseased area of the body, and then when you’re introducing foreign materials, I only assume that can have a detrimental effect on the future of that diseased organ state.
One of the interesting things, too, is I’ve been doing a study on my periodontal disease patients because we know there’s so much evidence showing how oral bacteria is present in the plaques in heart attack victims. We’re seeing it in the plaques of the brain of patients with Alzheimer’s. We know that it causes preterm labor, diabetes, and kidney disease.
Any inflammation creates these little cytokines. The effect of this inflammation caused by bacteria and toxins causes cytokines, and they travel all throughout the body. There’s a great researcher, Johann Lechner, and he is in Germany. He has done loads of research showing these specific cytokines that he can find in an extracted root canal tooth that is the same cytokine found in breast cancer, Parkinson’s, and MS. Can you now call this causative? That’s still up for debate, but certainly, there is a big link.
Dental disease is common, but it’s not normal.
Within dental school, we’re taught about biology. That everything is bacteria, and we got to kill all the bad. In my studying and thinking, that’s not the right approach. We’ve learned that with antibiotics. With the overuse of antibiotics, we’ve caused a big problem in this country, not just with resistance, but destroying our entire immunity by getting rid of the good bugs as well. Start to think about the whole idea behind the terrain theory. It is like everything that is going on in the world now. Everybody is reacting to this bug differently. If it was just about the virus, the bacteria, or the fungus, then everybody would have the exact same result, but that’s not true because it’s not about the microbe. It’s about how your body is reacting to this virus, bacteria, or fungus.
The healthier that our body is, the better our immune system can deal with whatever. That’s what I’ve been trying to have my patients focus on. It is getting rid of the parasites and the bacterial infections out of your body and creating health because then you’re going to be able to deal with anything that comes your way.
When I think about gum disease in the mouth, people will say, “It’s genetic.” My father and mother all had gum disease. The genetic component is that you have a susceptibility to not be able to detox well. I know myself. I’ve run my DNA, my kids, and my husband’s. I have very poor liver detox and mitochondrial enzymes. I have methylation issues, which by the way, more of us have methylation.
My enzymes work maybe at 70% normal, so for me, that means I have to pay a little bit more attention to binding up toxins and try to prevent them from coming into my body. My kids get upset, and they say, “So-and-so can eat a Twinkie all day. How come I can’t?” You’re not able to detox that Twinkie as well as the next person. That’s what the genetic component is.
Most of it we know through epigenetics that it is what’s happening in our environment. It’s not as if one day you swallow a bad bug that’s going to cause you to lose bone in your mouth. That’s not what happens. What happens is you are taking in other toxins, and your immune system is not functioning at best, so what happens is the nutritional environment in the mouth changes such that the forms of bacteria fungus in your mouth transform to what is called Pleomorphism. They change forms so that they can survive in this less oxygenated and less nutrient-rich environment. It’s exactly what happens with cancer. Cancer is an adaptation to an environment that has less oxygen. These bugs are transforming, and now, they’re more pathogenic.
They’re going to give off those cytokines, and that’s going to cause the autoimmune reaction of the destruction of your bone in the mouth, so instead of killing those bad bacteria, our goal is to replenish the nutrients and oxygen that are lost so that we rebound the good bacteria, which will naturally crowd out at the bad. That’s how you get curative. When you’re trying to kill something bad, you’re not going to get the cure, and then you’re continually putting more chemicals in the body, which is again contributing to that toxicity.
That’s why a lot of times, periodontal disease can be managed, but you never get the regrowth and the repair. In the studies we’re doing now, we’re using probiotics and a special toothpaste called Revitin, which I love because it has probiotics, minerals, vitamins, all of the nutrients that are necessary to support a healthy mouth environment.
I was going to ask you what your preferred toothpaste is.
I was using that alongside Dentalcidin. They have a lot of great products. Their G.I. Detox product is a nice one as well. That’s the other thing we’re always thinking of. If something’s happening here, then there’s toxicity in the gut, so when I’m treating somebody for periodontal disease, I love CellCore ’s whole protocol. I put them on the comprehensive protocol because this is autoimmune. We know that autoimmunity comes from the gut. We can treat here with some of the binders. I have them open capsules of the binders, then swish around with that, and then use the toothpaste and oral probiotics, but at the same time, we’re making sure the liver is working properly.
Everybody’s on thyroid medication because that’s so easily tested, but maybe it’s that liver that can’t convert that T4 to T3 properly, and that’s why you don’t have enough thyroid hormone. Our liver tests are only showing up if you have their functioning at less than 10%. We want to focus on making sure that the liver is draining. Many hormonal issues that women have are also because the liver is clogged, and it can’t deal with the onslaught of the toxins in our world now. Dr. Jay at the conference said there are over 80,000 chemicals. Our liver, kidneys, and bowels weren’t designed to be able to do that much detoxification.
That’s why we’re seeing such an increase in autoimmunity and chronic disease. The number one thing is awareness. That’s what’s exciting about these kinds of shows and conferences as we talk with one another and with our patients. We’re creating that awareness so patients know to go and ask and to look and be motivated to try to change the paradigm that we’re living in now. We have disease management. We do not have health care, but it is possible, and there are plenty of us out there who understand the way real health works and who are dedicated to trying to bring this knowledge to our patients.
As you said, it’s becoming more understood and accepted that antibiotics are not the way to heal up your gut or any infection because they can do a number on your intestinal bacteria. We have to recognize the same for our oral health. You mentioned how the mouth is the beginning of the gut, and we need to treat that as such, so balancing out that microbiome starts right in our mouth, and we need to take that into account on a daily basis.
The healthier our body is, the better our immune system can deal with whatever.
The other interesting thing is with the root canals and extraction sites. We call them cavitation. Again, they don’t hurt, but they may be harboring parasites, Lyme bacteria, fungus, and all sorts of nasty things because there’s no more blood flow. When you have a root canal, you’re killing the tooth. I describe it to patients like if your appendix was inflamed and burst, we don’t take it out, clean it out, shove it with some rubber, and put it back in the body. Dentistry is the only profession where we mummify an organ and keep it in the body. Anytime there’s any dead tissue or bacteria, all the bad stuff instantly is going to go to that area. That’s how nature and science works.
However, we decided to do this in dentistry so that we could keep the teeth and we could chew. It makes sense. It sounds great in theory. If you take out these teeth 100% of the time, you’re going to find these bacteria. Everybody is different, and some people’s immune system is able to keep that at bay. When I look at a patient, and they have chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or some other unknown autoimmune disease, then I’m thinking, “That probably shouldn’t be in there,” and we’ll use some muscle kinesiology or some muscle testing to know if that tooth affecting your immune system negatively that we need to remove it.
Dr. Jerry Tennant was an ophthalmologist and now does natural medicine. He talked about every single root canal could shut down the circuit of the meridian by 60%. That’s another fascinating thing for your audience to look at those teeth meridian charts. You can find them all over Google. Your front teeth are related to your kidney, bladder, and reproductive organs. The upper molars are related to the breasts, so with women, if they have a tooth that’s breaking down or infected and maybe they need a root canal or extraction, I’m having that conversation like, “Is there a breast cancer history?” I want to know if there is any of that and what’s the rest of their body like.
What do you typically find when you ask those sorts of questions? Does it correlate?
It’s amazing 100% of the time. I had a new patient. He had an unremarkable health history other than he had follicular lymphoma of his ureter a few years back. I said, “I’ve never heard of that,” and then I went and looked at his x-rays. He has one root canal right on that meridian. I had a very young patient. You could see one of his molars that had a root canal. It didn’t look very good on the x-ray with maybe infection. I said, “Do you have any aches and pains anywhere?” He’s like, “I cannot get my left shoulder to heal no matter what I do.” It was the left molar and the left shoulder. As soon as that tooth was out, the shoulder healed immediately.
I’ve had a breast cancer patient. It was a woman that her tooth had broken, and a year later, she developed breast cancer. She was a new patient to me. She hadn’t had it treated. By the time she came to see me, it was a big abscess. She was undergoing breast treatment, and I was like, “We got to get that out of there.”
Almost every single day, I see that connection. It’s people who have a joint replacement. I’ve had two patients that had a joint replacement, and then a tooth starts hurting. When you’re taking the joint out, you’re disrupting all the blood flow and lymph flow. We think of teeth as this mechanical chewing thing, but it’s an organ. Every single tooth has its own blood supply, lymph supply, and nerve supply.
This is also how cavities form. It’s not the external force of the sugar. It’s the internal sugar causing the internal pH to become more acidic. When your body is acidic, your blood has to maintain a very fine line of neutrality, so when the blood is very acidic, it needs minerals. Minerals are what’s going to balance that pH. What’s the highest concentration of minerals in our body? It’s our teeth and our bones.
What happens is the fluid flow in the teeth changes direction, so instead of coming up from the body and delivering those nutrients to the enamel surface, it’s going to pull those minerals out of the enamel and back into circulation to try to neutralize. Those teeth then have less mineral, so now they are more susceptible to the normal bacteria and acid that’s in the mouth. The bacteria and acid have something to do with it, but they become more susceptible because of what’s going on down deeper in our gut.
That’s where you’re saying you create this terrain for it to become more pathogenic.
The more alkaline that’s in our diet, the less acidic we are. We will test the pH of our patient’s saliva when they come in. We tend to be more concerned with the people who are more acidic. However, we find the people who are very alkaline, that’s eight and over, those are the patients who have even more decay and problems because when you’re so alkaline, you’ve completely lost the ability to detox.
We learned it in CellCore. Their products are very acidic because we have energy. The more basic you are, the less energy you have. That was a very interesting finding to me because you think you want to be as alkaline as possible, but you don’t. You want to try to be neutral because either that swings on either side is an imbalance. The whole idea is we need to try to be balanced. It’s not too good, and not too bad.
That makes them think about ozone. A patient once said to me, “Isn’t ozone an oxidant?” It is, but this is what we need in our bodies. We need that oxidant to stimulate our body to help heal. Again, you need that balance. I know some patients that put too much of the antioxidants. They’re like, “I need to have all this stuff,” but if you have too much antioxidant and not enough oxidation, that balance is thrown off, and then you get people whose immune system doesn’t react very well. The people who say, “I never get sick,” as a badge of honor, that may not necessarily be a good thing. You want to be able to get sick and recover quickly. That’s how you determine if somebody is really well. They get sick, but within a day or two, they’re back to normal.
We want to be able to deal with the stress but be able to come back down.
You can handle it. Your immune system can take care of it.
Correct, and that’s what we want. We want adaptability. Now, there’s so much talk about heart rate variability. We want to be able to deal with the stress but be able to come back down. It’s being able to have that adaptability to encounter some virus, bacteria, or whatever it is, but then the body has enough strength to overcome it and bring us back to balance.
We, as humans, have never lived in a sterile environment, and we certainly don’t now. We’ve got a lot more burden environmentally, but we’ve always had this homeostasis that our body’s trying to keep everything in this very narrow range, and that’s not any different now.
We’re finally understanding that. It’s going to have the opposite effect.
That has become completely overdone. I wanted to briefly go back to the organ system in the mouth and the meridians of the mouth. Specifically for our audience that’s more cardiac in nature, the wisdom teeth are on the heart meridian. If you could elaborate on that a little bit, that would be very interesting.
The heart and the small intestine are both on that meridian for our wisdom teeth, which are the teeth furthest in the back. Those are the most common ones that are extracted. That’s something we also want to look at. Those are the most common area we find cavitation. Cavitation is a hole in the bone where you had a tooth extracted, but the bone didn’t fill in, so if you open it up, you find all this fibrous tissue, a lot of infection, and stuff that shouldn’t be there, or let’s say you have a wisdom tooth that has a large filling on it or a metal crown and that’s next to a tooth with a dissimilar metal, so again, you can have that electrical conductivity, which can impact the heart.
I think back to my father-in-law, who had so many different crowns. He always had heart issues. He was well-maintained. He had a great cardiologist. The downfall was all the digestive issues. Maybe somebody who has uncontrolled high blood pressure has a lot of metal in the mouth that’s interacting and creating a problem. If you find a biologic dentist, that’s the number one thing that we’re all trained in. It’s how to remove those fillings properly because when you could go to a regular dentist, and they pull it all out of there without those proper safety precautions, you’re going to be breathing in that metal. Not only yourself, but the doctors also are breathing it in.
All these years, I didn’t know how to take care of myself properly. Now, I’m trying to pull the metals out of my nerves. That’s what happens when you’re breathing in those vapors. It gets into your nerves, and that’s challenging to try to get out of your system. Also, being pregnant, my babies now got metal. You have to have more precautions, especially if you have multiple taken out at once, that can overload the system, and that can be the final tipping point that makes your bucket fall over, and then all of a sudden, you feel terrible.
If you’re not pooping properly, you don’t know how to sweat, your liver is clogged up, and then you try to get all this heavy metal removed, you’re also going to feel really bad. We like to take everybody, think about where they are at, and try to prepare them for during and after the procedure to make sure they have the best outcome possible because we know heavy metals are nasty.
Also, every time you’re chewing, you’re releasing a little bit of that mercury vapor. Every day, you are a little bit letting off that vapor. Anybody with a heart condition, I would recommend that you see a biologic dentist, or even if you don’t have high blood pressure. Let’s not wait until you develop high blood pressure. It’s a good idea. We have great alternatives of materials now. For overall health, it’s worthwhile.
It’s interesting because you see 80-year-old patients, and they have a mouthful, and they’re fine. People will say, “They’re fine.” As young kids, they didn’t have as many processed foods. They didn’t have this super-toxic environment, and that’s what’s most important because our immune system develops our children. The only toxin they had, maybe as a young child, was the mercury fillings. They didn’t have all that other stuff. They are 80 now, and their bodies can handle it. Now, our babies are already born with 200 plus chemicals in their bodies before they take their first breath. It’s problematic.
These older people, they’re a heartier stock, because when they were growing up, they didn’t have all this nonsense that we have now. Every generation is getting a little bit sicker and weaker, so we got to think about that for our kids. If you are a mom or you’re thinking about getting pregnant, try to get all that out of you because every time you chew as a pregnant woman, that mercury is going right through the placental barrier. You want to try to get that out at least six months before you plan on getting pregnant, but sometimes, we can’t always determine that, but it’s something to think about.
That’s great advice.
Another interesting thing with the heart is if you see a long line dripping or you see some that have the little line in the crease right by their ear, it’s another sign of heart weakness too. That’s one thing that we can see on the face. Any of those heart issues can be related to toxicity in the mouth. I think about high cholesterol too. I’m not thinking, “You’ve got a deficiency in a statin. That’s your problem.” I’m thinking, “You’ve got some inflammation.”
I think what people don’t understand is that the so-called bad cholesterol is really a band-aid, so there’s something that’s causing damage to your blood vessels. The liver is recruited to create your LDL to bandage it up. Ideally, you’re supposed to bandage it up. The body comes along, cleans it up, and it’s gone. When we’re constantly attacking this blood vessel, then we’re constantly making more LDL. If we stop making one of the most critical substances in the body, what’s that going to do long-term? Every single cell in our body is made of cholesterol. We need cholesterol, so what we need to find is what is causing that damage. Is it this heavy metal that you’re constantly swallowing all the time? Do you have parasites stuck in cavitation that are causing this inflammation?
Get enough knowledge so you can make an informed decision for yourself.
An interesting thing too is parasites can cause teeth grinding, so when I’m looking at the airway, are you coming forward to try to open your airway, or could there be parasites? Almost everybody has parasites, if not all of us. That should be in the differential. Those are the kinds of things we want to be thinking. If we take blood tests and we don’t see anything maybe in the bloodstream, we got to look in the mouth. Go to a trained biologic dentist who knows to look for these, especially ones who are trained in muscle kinesiology, because there aren’t a lot of great tests we can do.
They have super floss where you can take a special floss, send that into DNA connections, and they’ll tell you what bacteria is in there, or they also have a little saliva thing that you can do, and we can see that. Those tests do get pricey, so I’m not recommending it for everybody. I’m just thinking about getting the mouth healthy. Let’s use these specific and easy supplements to do it that way.
What would your approach to a patient be that has been told that they need a root canal or they’ve got a mouth full of fillings? How does your approach vary if they were to see you, a biologic dentist, versus a standard trained dentist?
Number one, I’m taking a thorough history and what has gone on. Much of what happens in our life happened decades ago. It’s that gradual increase in toxicity, so I like to know exactly what’s going on in your life. Let’s say you’re fifteen years old, and you fall off your bike. You break your front tooth, and maybe you could get a root canal. That’s okay. You’re fifteen years old. You get the root canal knowing it’s a temporary thing, but the kid is still growing. They can’t get an implant until they’re at least 21 anyway. Sometimes, you can do a root canal as long as you’re explaining to them that this may be a temporary measure.
Let’s say you have an adult, and they have a ton of health issues. I explain to them the consequences. I’d be like, “Here’s what I know about root canals that even a perfectly done one by the best endodontist, it’s still a dead organ. You’re going to harbor these issues.” I also like to do muscle testing. Can your body handle the root canal at this moment’s time? I give them the option. I’d say, “Here’s what I know, and here are your different options,” and then it’s ultimately up to the patient. I stopped doing root canals in my practice. I said, “I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t feel comfortable with it.” When sometimes do people need them, then I have somebody to refer to, but I no longer want to do that.
I could understand that.
Everybody who comes gets an individualized approach, and we talk about based on you, your values and what it is you’re hoping to accomplish. I want to help give you enough knowledge so you can make an informed decision for yourself.
It’s understanding the risks and benefits. We talked about how maybe all of these inflammatory pathways can start in your mouth and then wind up affecting your cardiovascular system and creating some clacks. If you’re getting amalgams removed, for example, priming your body for those detox pathways to be open can be preventative stuff before you go into having these metals released.
One of the most common issues you see, especially in my women patients, is constipation. Do not try to remove any toxins because you are just going to back yourself up and feel awful. I like the bowel movement from CellCore. I use a lot of vitamin C. Most of us are deficient in vitamin C in the first place, so use enough vitamin C until you get to bowel tolerance. I’m making sure we have a sauna in our office now. If they don’t have one at home or they’re not exercising every day, we want to make sure that they can sweat.
Years ago, when I was dealing with my health issues, I didn’t sweat. I could sit in my sauna for 30 minutes and not sweat. It was not until I started doing it more and more that it started pushing open that pathway because it was completely blocked for me. That’s common in a lot of women, specifically that I’ve found in my patient population. For years, I took out the amalgams not in the proper way. Nobody died. It wasn’t tragic, but that’s the thing that it may not happen right away. You do hear stories all the time like, “I was fine until that time I had that dental work.”
We all go into this profession wanting to help people. Some of us have become more aware a lot of times through our health struggles and how we want to practice better. I want to do better. I want to give my patients actual health. I don’t want to be a tooth engineer. Ideally, my dream is to never pick up a drill again because I have made everybody aware of what dental disease is, how we can prevent it, and how we can be well. That’s my goal.
Some of the best practitioners, I think, in any field have to go through struggles on their own to identify the better ways that they can do something to become the best in their field. You mentioned your favorite toothpaste. What are some things that our audience can start doing to ensure a better approach to oral health and to be a better approach to holistic health?
Number one is your gut and making sure that your gut lining is healthy. Eating a nutrient-dense diet is super important, but even so, we’re all busy. We live crazy lives. I suggest taking binders. I love CellCore products. They have several different binders. If you have dental disease, their BioToxin Binder is fantastic. I would recommend that you take a capsule, open it up, and put it in a little bit of water. It does not taste wonderful, but you swish it around and swallow. I’ll have you do that one a day, and then you can take a capsule at night.
Do that at least once a day to be open because you’re going to collect any toxicity in the mouth as well as the stomach. If you’re just swallowing it, it doesn’t open maybe until the small intestine, so you miss a huge section of the gut there. Probiotics are important. Soil-based seem to be getting a lot of media coverage these days. Like a toothpaste, too, it’s important to change it up once in a while because the healthiest microbiome is one that’s very diverse, so if we’re taking the same probiotic month after month, we’re creating an imbalance. We don’t want to do that. Also, plain old hydrogen peroxide, you dilute that 50/50 with water and swish with that before you go to bed. Nothing bad can survive in an oxygenated environment.
With that, would you swish and spit?
Yes. You swish and spit right before you go to bed like that last thing. You’re getting tons of oxygen. You don’t have to go and buy Colgate’s peroxide. Buy a plain old $2.99 brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide. You don’t even have to buy fancy toothpaste. If you have a pretty healthy mouth, then just use baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, and some nice sea salt, which is loaded with good minerals, those are enough to keep your mouth healthy. Again, think about the caveman. They didn’t ever brush their teeth. We want to brush our teeth to remove the plaque from the stuff we eat. I have almost all my patients on the CT-Minerals from CellCore. I love that.
It is liquid. Many of us do have digestive issues, so it’s hard for us to digest. When you’re taking the liquid and these fulvic and humic acids, which are natural, our body recognizes that because it’s made from plants. Also, the great thing about CellCore is the intention behind their products. I think it is something that also makes them effective. I had one patient who had ridged fingernails, which is a sign of poor absorption. I put her on CT-Minerals, and in one month, she came back, and she was like, “Look at my thumb.” Her whole life, she had ridged fingernails, and in one month on the CT-Minerals, it was gone. A hygienist had the exact same. She was like, “What happened to my ridges?” That is an excellent product.
The healthiest microbiome is one that’s very diverse.
The food supply is so deficient now. Some of the statistics show there are more than 50% fewer nutrients in our foods now. Everybody needs to be on supplementation, and kids especially. Think about the kids’ average diet. It’s no bueno. It’s really processed and lacking in healthy fats. I see so many kids, and it’s tragic with all the decay. They’re all very toxic, so I put them on that CT-Minerals because it seals up those tight junctions that cause a leaky gut and lead to those immune and toxic gut issues.
Those are great tips and essentially very low cost. As you said, it’s off-the-shelf hydrogen peroxide, getting a good quality toothpaste, and keeping your gut nice and diverse. I always tell patients you can eat one healthy food all the time, and it’s still going to be healthy for you, but you’re not going to get everything you need, so diversify your probiotics. I always suggest some fermented foods as well. Those are wonderful and very actionable tips, so I appreciate that. I have one last question for you that I ask all of the people that join us on the show. How do you live a heart-healthy lifestyle?
I try to exercise. Being a practice owner, a mom, and a wife, something that was important for my health was trying to be calm. I do try to do Qigong every single morning. For people who don’t know, it is a moving meditation. Yoga was a little bit too slow for me. Qigong is a way to try to balance those whole energy systems in your body so that I can start my day feeling centered and grounded.
That has been important to keep my nervous system as stable as possible. I try to exercise most days. I like to take my dog to work so I can have an excuse that I have to take her for a walk at lunchtime, and I try to eat, as you were saying, the diverse diet and getting all of those different colors. All those polyphenols are super valuable, and making sure that I’m getting in all my vegetables and then having that right mindset. That’s something we don’t think about enough.
It is holistic. It is mind, body, all of it. It’s a balancing act, as you described. Where can our audience learn more about you? Where can they find a dentist that considers their liver detox pathways? It’s probably not your common dentist that you run into, so where can people learn more about that?
The two organizations that are the easiest to find are IAOMT.org and then there’s IABDM.org. Those two organizations have certification processes to know how to take out amalgams properly. I’m certified with both of them. The IABDM certification is a little more rigorous. You have to take a test, but you also have to prove by talking to one of their education liaisons that you are doing it properly and that you have all the equipment.
Anybody can call themselves biologic, so if you’re certified with those two organizations, you know that desk dentist has taken more education and gone the mile there. My website is CarverFamilyDentistry.com. It is a work in progress. I’m very busy. We’re working on getting as much information in there as possible, but there is some good information you can find in there.
We look forward to seeing all of the information that you can put out to us. This has been so informative for me, and I know our audience is going to gain so much from this. I appreciate you spending some time with us and sharing your wealth of knowledge. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this episode. We will be back next week. Have a great day.
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About Dr. Rachaele Carver
Dr. Carver graduated from UCONN School of Dental Medicine in 2003. After residency she spent a few years in Boston then bought her own practice in Western MA in 2009. Since experiencing her own health issues in 2011 and finding that traditional medicine did not have the answers, she began studying functional medicine and dentistry. She received advanced training in occlusion and TMJ treatment, ozone therapy, energy medicine, ayurvedic medicine and chinese medicine.
In 2015 she became a certified Health Coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and in 2020 became a board certified Biologic dentist. Dr. Carver practices integrative whole body dentistry focusing on the root cause of dental disease. Her goal is to educate her patients and practitioners alike to recognize the causes of oral disease and implement preventative strategies.
