EPISODE SUMMARY
Guest: Elizabeth Beard, DDS with Renew Dental
What is Biologic Dentistry?
A healthy Mouth equals a Healthy Body. Your mouth is a mirror to your body's health The goal is to reduce inflammation.
What is the same and different about biologic dentistry and traditional dental care?
Mercury. Why it is important to remove it from our mouth using safety measures.
Why Ozone and PRC is used to promote healing. What is it, and what does it do?
How Dentistry can help migraines.
Addressing Comfort and Fear and Anxiety.
Why using X-Rays, CBCT-scan, and other technology is safe and crucial to excellent care.
To find out more about Renew Dental, go to https://renewdentallbk.com/
To contact Ruth, go to https://www.blairclinic.com
ruth@blairclinic.com
https://www.facebook.com/rutelin
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome, welcome, welcome to What Pain in the Neck. I am Ruth Elder, your host, and I am super pleased with our awesome guest today. She is a fantastic doctor here in Lubbock. She is actually my doctor, and it's Dr. Elizabeth Baird, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, thank you for having me.
Why don't you tell our listeners what your specialty is? What kind of doctor are you?
I am a biologic dentist, who we specialize in a more of a functional approach to dentistry and medicine, and how your mouth health is connected to the rest of your body.
Yes, and I'm so excited to get into that, where we're going to dig deep in that a little bit further in. What is biologic dentistry, what's the same, what's different from general dentistry and why do it, what's it good for, and how does it affect the rest of the body? All of that good stuff, I can't wait to look into it. I've learned so much from you.
Yes, good.
Before we do, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, starting with growing up and what led you into this career?
I grew up in Lubbock. I have known that I've wanted to be a dentist since I was about 16. My sister who is about five years younger than me started to need a bunch of dental care, right about the time I got my driver's license. It was really convenient for my parents for me to drive her to all of her appointments.
Okay.
I got to know a lot of these doctors that were helping her, her orthodontist and the surgeons that were helping her through her issues, and I recognized that they were doing some pretty neat things, and they were happy, and their staff seemed happy, so it was a fun place for us to be. Anyway, that's where it came from.
That's interesting that you would say that because a lot of people are super scared of going to the dentist, but I know the way you just described that dental office is how I would describe your office.
Oh, good. Thank you.
You're always so happy, it's always a pleasure to be there, and like my husband said, is just like a bunch of friends having fun together. We get to come in and participate in that for however long we were there.
Yes, the environment is everything. If you're comfortable and happy, that spreads and it spreads to your patients, and that's really important to us.
Yes, so at age 16, you made the decision, you wanted to be a dentist. Did you know about biologic dentistry at that time?
Gosh, no. I was probably a senior in dental school before I really started to understand what biologic dentistry was. I had one of my very best friends in dental school, her mother is a biologic dentist, and so she grew up in that realm. She was really, really influential in the way I started to think and practice and question things that didn't quite make sense to me.
You started by saying that you're a general dentist specializing in being a biologic dentist.
Yes.
What's the same and what's different?
At the end of the day, it's all dentistry, it's all fillings and crowns and cleanings, and the same thing that I would have done before our thought process behind it is a little bit different. The way we go about treatment planning and visiting with patients is we want to decrease your mouths contribution to your inflammatory load. All disease processes starts at an inflammatory level.
Because of that, if you can reduce your inflammatory level, then you reduce, either if you are sick, reduce the symptoms, you can be preventative in your care and try to control your inflammation to try not to be ill later in life. That's our thought process behind what it is we do and plan for.
I feel like that's how it really complements what we do here in the upper cervical practice well too.
Yes.
Because if you have pressure on the nerves in the neck, right there at the brainstem, talk about inflammation--
Yes, nothing heals, right?
Right. It's a similar thing with the mouth. If you have something coming along, obviously, it's not how we would say it, but you have stuff growing in your mouth that shouldn't be there, or you have on your door, I noticed, healthy mouth, healthy body?
Right.
What's the connection?
It's been said for a long time that your mouth is a mirror to your body's health. With a healthy mouth, so healthy teeth, healthy gums, healthy airway, with that, that gives your body the chance that it needs to stay well.
That's a good explanation. Talk about fillings. There's different kinds of fillings and some fillings you put in, and some you take out.
Sure. Everybody is worried about their mercury fillings, the silver fillings that a lot of our older patients, most dentists don't place those anymore, thank goodness, because they are 50% mercury. There's been plenty of studies that shown that the mercury stays volatile while it's in your mouth. Any time there's friction from chewing, or heat, from coffee or something like that, then the chances of some mercury gas seeping out is very high.
Depending on your genetic makeup and how you process toxins and challenges in your body, you can really hold on to some of that mercury, and that can cause some really damaging things down the line. Mercury, in a lot of ways, mostly, it just stops enzymatic processes from happening, and that can cause a ton of--
Enzymatic processes, that's the digestion and things like that that happen in the mouth?
It can be digestion, it can be the way we metabolize, chemicals in our bodies and foods and all kinds of stuff. At a molecular level, works to stop these processes that need to be happening.
I've heard somewhere that when you eat and you chew the food, the absorption happens really much quicker in the mouth than other places. For instance, I take some medicine, then it just dissolve in my gums.
Oh, sure. All of the membranes and inside your mouth are very porous to things that we put into our mouths. Things like medicine will absorb really well across those membranes, but the bad things will absorb really well across these membranes as well.
I can see that connection.
It happens in your gut, too. You swallow this food that may have some mercury in it, and it will really disturb your microbiome and your gut, it will amp up inflammation and inflammatory markers, just in that area alone and we all know what that can do.
Yes, I think we'll pick that up in another episode.
Okay.
We can probably do several episodes on that.
Sure, yes.
I saw something online on your website, where you talked about biocompatibility.
Sure. As I said earlier, our whole idea about our approach to dentistry is to decrease your mouth's contribution to your inflammatory load. That comes from several places. It comes from the toxic materials that are used in dental materials like amalgam, the silver mercury fillings, it comes from materials that are used, that are maybe not technically toxic, but that are very inflammatory to your tissues. That would be similar to wearing cheap jewelry and your skin is inflamed.
Turning green?
Yes, turning green or swollen or itchy or something like that. If you've got a crown or a feeling that your body is not compatible with, that's just a constant inflammation in that area. Other places that cause inflammation, or your gums, if you've got periodontal disease, or even just some gingivitis, maybe it's been a minute since you've had your teeth cleaned, that's a huge place where inflammation comes from, and obviously infections, so infected teeth, infected root canal teeth, infected bone area, it's all over the place.
How do we know if we're having, if we're not feeling good or we're coming to you and we want to find out what's going on, what is your process for figuring out, "Oh, yes, there's inflammation here." What is causing it? Is it the mercury? Is it because I maybe eat something that I shouldn't eat or maybe I have an infection? How is your process to unravel all of that and figure out what's what, and what's causing what, and what to treat first, and that kind of stuff?
Sure, I think that we approach everybody very similar. It's all about the patient's history and what they're concerned about. We have several diagnostic things that we do in order to unravel somebody's situation. There we'll take a full set of X-rays to make sure that there's no infection. That also ensures gum health and all the things. We will take a Cone Beam CT scan so we can see in three dimensions what your bone looks like, what the roots of your teeth look like. We can evaluate places in your bone where you have had teeth taken out before.
We can evaluate your airway and how much space you have to breathe. There's so many things that we can see in three dimensions on the Cone Beam. Then a visual exam. You get your gums measured to make sure that your periodontal health is well, and then obviously, just taking a look and see what the teeth look like. We do look at teeth too.
Yes, that's great. That is the general part of your general dentistry. You also do some specialized procedures. You do surgeries and you have some innovating healing procedures.
Yes, sure. We do a lot of surgery. We end up taking some teeth out. When we do that, we use ozone. We use ozone a little bit differently than ozone is used in functional medicine.
What is ozone and what's it for? How do you use it?
We use it topically. Ozone is a gas that when introduced to an area in your mouth or even in your blood, it changes the chemistry. It will attack places on bacterial cell walls, and it will leave our cell walls alone so it disinfects areas. It calls your immune system to that area so that it knows that it needs to heal something or fight an infection. It will change the pH of an area, which will help in a lot of ways to heal and to treat an infection. In dentistry, we use it in certain ways, and in medicine, you can bubble it in through your blood and do all kinds of stuff.
You put it on the gum, and the way I'm understanding what you're saying is almost like it's creating a protective barrier.
Yes, and it's turning things on. It's turning on your healing, and it's turning on your body's natural defenses to come and help. After we've taken out a tooth, we will bubble the ozone into the socket, and so that will disinfect the area. Like I said, it will call the healing components of your blood to the area so that they'll know that it's time to get to work. When we're doing surgery, we'll use the PRF. I think that we probably did that for you.
Yes, I can't wait to tell that story. I have a really fun story to tell about this, but before you do that, what is PRF? I've never heard of biologic dentistry until today, and I most certainly don't know what PRF is, so why don't you explain that?
PRF stands for platelet-rich fibrin. It is a little procedure that we do where we draw blood and spin your blood down in a centrifuge. We pull the good parts of your blood clot out of the tube, and we use that in the surgical site to help you heal. What's really great is that we don't add anything to it, so it's just your stuff going back into your mouth.
Again, it sounds similar to ozone. It's like reinforcement and healing.
What I feel like it does, what I've seen it do, it gives your body a jump start on the healing. Your body would have done that anyway, it would have put blood clots in and stabilized it. Right after the extraction, it's giving your body about a three and sometimes five-day jump start into your healing, which is really great for post-op pain and the discomfort that comes inevitably after surgery. We've found that our patients are a whole lot more comfortable after surgery.
I'm going to actually tell a story about this. When we moved here to Lubbock, and there's an episode on the show that we just recorded about how all of that happened, but it was a very stressful time in our life for me and my husband, Dr. Gordon Elder. He was working super hard and with all the stress, he cracked a tooth. Fortunately, you were one of the first people that we were introduced to here in Lubbock. In that episode, we also talked about how one of the ways that we've been happy to be in Lubbock is just working with other doctors.
Yes, this community.
Yes, it's like you have a community of doctors, and you're, I think, the first doctor that he met here, and that was a good thing because he needed you quick. I guess it was cracked, and the best way it needed to come out, and you did this for him. Then I was all concerned. He had had surgery. I was thinking soup and pudding and load up on Advil and things like that. Then as it turned out, we had dinner guests that night. One of my kids had invited some friends. I had sausage.
He said when I was going to figure out, "Do we eat yogurt or soup?" He says, "No, I want sausage." He ate the sausage. He never took the Advil, and I could not believe it. It seemed to me how I would expect him to be, like you said, speed up the healing. It's how I would have expected him to be maybe five days in.
Right, yes. That's why I love it so much. I also love that you just don't add anything to it. It's just the patient's stuff going back into the patient, and we've really been pleased at the results. It's been great.
I've told a story. Do you have any stories that spring to mind of things that you have seen that you would like to share?
We work with our medical community, and we've got great partnerships with a bunch of these doctors. We're just one part. It's like the chiropractor. Dr. Elder is just one part of the big picture that's the holistic part of everything that we do, right?
Absolutely.
There's a patient that comes to mind who was having debilitating migraines. Otherwise, a fairly healthy 25-year-old girl. She could not let any light in, was wearing sunglasses, and a scarf wrapped around her head, would lay down in my waiting room. We were able to identify a couple of teeth that were infected, so that's a huge cause of inflammation. We were able to take the teeth out and get that part well. Checking that off the list allowed her body to overcome-- that was a hurdle that her body was having to overcome every day, that was keeping her from being well.
That's a really good example of where we started with a healthy mouth, healthy body.
Right. You take all the hurdles away, and then your body does what it's built to do. God gave us these amazing bodies that will heal themselves if we take away the bad stuff and put the good stuff back in.
Yes, excellent. A lot of people have been hurt badly with dental things or have serious fear. Some of it is based on terrifying things that have happened to them in the past, and some maybe you don't want terrifying things to happen so can you talk about fear and comfort and how you handle that?
That's really important to us, right? I'm so proud of my staff because they care as much and a lot of times more about people's comfort than I even do.
It permeates all through your clinic then.
Oh, good. I think that everybody that works with me would be really proud to hear you say that.
It's true.
We just try to meet people where they are, and to identify-- if somebody's anxious about dentistry or about a specific procedure, just try to understand what it is. There's tons of things that we can do to reduce anxiety. We can give you medicine to reduce anxiety. We can do the laughing gas, the nitrous oxide. Really, my goal for that is to identify the fear and to address it, and to educate the patient about what's about to happen. They don't have to guess anything, right? They don't have to because I think the unknown is scarier than what you know about.
I think someone who's been in your office a few times and had some procedures myself. One of the things that I think is important, you do all those things, educate, and all of that. Despite the fact that I know you have a very thriving busy practice, you never seem busy. It's like when you're in that situation, you're there with your patient, you're fully present and you never seem rushed.
Thank you. That means a lot to me. I try really hard to be present for people so that--
It's like magic to me.
Oh, good. I feel like that's how I would want it, right? You treat people how you want to be treated. We learn that in grade school. It's one of those I think that being able to spend time, part of what we do is we do have longer appointments. You ask about the diagnostic things that we do. Our first appointment takes sometimes two and a half hours in the office. We really do try to understand where the patient is, what they need, what their needs from us, their needs from somebody else that maybe we can help them with, then just try to take good care of people. [laughs]
Yes, and you do that.
Thank you. Thanks.
I've asked you some questions but you know so much more. Sometimes I don't even really know what are the most important questions. What I want to know, what is the answer to whatever the most important question is that you wish that everybody knew?
Oh, Ruth, Let's see. I think that the most important thing to know is that everybody's different. There's no cookie cutter treatment plan for-- mine is going to look different than yours will, then we'll look different from Dr. Elders. In order for us to tailor a plan and a whole treatment, what am I trying to say? A treatment idea. We need to take time and understand the problems and to do all of the diagnostic testing to get there. Sometimes people don't want to have their X-rays taken because they're concerned about radiation, which I think is valid.
What would you say to that person? How do you address that? What's important here?
Now, in dentistry with all of the technology that we have, and you know I love technology.
Yes, as do we hear.
Right. I love it. With all of the technology, with all of the digital X-rays, the amount of radiation that you actually receive, even with a full set of x-rays and a Cone Beam CT is so low, it's less than a transatlantic flight. You can fly from LA to New York and receive more radiation there than you will in a first visit at my office. Nobody wants any amount of radiation, but in order for us to actually see what's happening, I don't have X-rays in my eyeballs. I wish I did so many times. If we can see everything, then we can diagnose and then we can treat. That's pretty important.
I listened to a podcast that actually was four doctors that had a CBCT or a Cone Beam CT scan machine like you have in your office and we have in our office, right? An expert in that was on a lecturer that I listened to four doctors. He said that if you sat through a hundred scans as a patient, then you would still be way below the safe line. Nobody ever gets more than-- I mean, if a fluke scenario happens, you may have to redo it once, you may get two but not more than that ever.
I'm really excited. Actually, on Friday we get a new CBCT machine that has an ultra low dose. I'm excited about the technology and all of the things that come with that, but also it's even lower than low. I mean, it's going to be great.
The CBCT scan is really exciting. It's a win-win. You get so much better picture for so much less time and less radiation.
Right. Lots of information. That's good.
That would actually be fun to do a whole show on sometime. Dr. Baird, there is one more thing I want to ask you about. That's circling way back to amalgam and the mercury. I personally had a couple of those fillings and you took one of them out. I'd already taken one out somewhere else, but when you did it, you had a whole thing going on. Why don't you talk about that procedure. What it is and why?
Sure. The whole problem with amalgam is that the mercury and the amalgam is toxic. The last thing we want is while we're taking it out to expose you or me to any more because we've already got the exposure, we want to decrease that as much as possible. We remove these fillings with a technique called the smart technique. It's been studied to show that the amount of mercury that you're actually exposed to with all of the preventative things that we do is much less than if we were just to buzz it out in normal.
What we do is we isolate the tooth with a rubber dam, we cover you up from head to toe because I don't want you taking it home with you on your clothes.
A whole sheet over my mouth.
Yes. There's a big external suction in your mouth and then we are protected too, right? We've got big protective masks that filter out mercury. We are covered from head to toe too because we also don't want to take it home to our families and to us. The whole thing takes longer to get dressed up and set up than it does to actually get the filling out. I mean, you know how serious I take it because it is such a procedure. If I can keep you from not ingesting or inhaling any more mercury, that's the whole goal.
That's why we're doing that in the first place.
Sure.
That's good to know. Well, you have given us so much great information today. On this podcast, I'm trying to get information out there that will really help people feel better and tooth problems, mouth problems can be a really pain in the neck.
Sure.
If you have inflammation in your mouth or even just navigating the whole field of what kind of dentist do I go to and what do I do with this fear I have? I think the reason I wanted to have you on is to let people know that there is a more holistic approach, more natural ways, and ways that actually helps you heal faster with less pain. Also, the fact that you are just super nice people and really make the whole environment pleasant.
Well, thank you.
Thank you so much for your time and I really appreciate the information you have given today.
Oh my gosh, thank You so much for having me, Ruth. This was great. Thank you.