Changing Oral Medicine

Did you know that many common chronic conditions—including obesity, inflammation, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and cancer, among others—often have their origins in the mouth? Dr. Dominik Nischwitz is an expert on the mouth’s vital role in the body’s microbiome. His groundbreaking book, It’s All in Your Mouth, presents a necessary new approach to natural immunity to chronic disease. In the excerpt that follows, Nischwitz makes his case for integrating dental hygiene into whole body health.

The following is an excerpt from the Chelsea Green 2020 Spring Journal. It has been adapted for the web.

Prefer Audio?

Listen to the following excerpt from the audiobook of It’s All In Your Mouth.

Conventional medicine still turns to the old paradigms for diseases of the twenty-first century, sometimes because the health care system doesn’t allow for anything else. On average, a doctor has just less than seven minutes to see each patient. Ninety percent of appointments are spent talking about symptoms and related medications. Medicine today has standard treatments for diseases with different causes. The focus is always on the disease, rather than the person’s health. Rarely does medicine offer tailor-made solutions—though there are some. Most illnesses people are suffering from today did not simply break out like an infection. They are mostly acquired as a result of our modern lifestyles. This is why we also need other, new ways of dealing with them.

It might seem an unusual choice to start this process in the mouth—some people even laugh at the thought or try to downplay the importance of oral hygiene. But dentistry is changing, too. It has done valuable and considerable work as a repair medicine. Whereas not so long ago, the only possible treatment was tooth extraction, today there are other options available that are not only tolerable but also aesthetically perfect. Although we now know a lot more about techniques, materials, and the right precautions to take, in terms of pure detail work, modern dentistry is restricted primarily to its traditional working environment: the mouth. Modern dentistry can and should look far beyond this area. A new dentistry should broaden its focus to involve the rest of the body. Research has already clearly shown us the way: The connections between disease in the mouth and chronic disease elsewhere in the body are unambiguous, and gradually new theories are paving the way in our minds and textbooks.

Biological dentistry does not aim to act as a supplement or alternative to traditional dentistry, but as an extension. It’s about jumping over holes rather than digging them deeper. It aims to bring disciplines together rather than disrupt them. I dream of a world where dentistry and general medicine do not form separate spheres, but work hand in hand. I dream of a medicine that rejects the idea of separating the body into sections and instead acquires more knowledge about integrative concepts. I dream of a medicine that trains both patients and doctors to understand our organism as a whole. A medicine that understands what causes disruption, but also how the body can regenerate and heal.

A progressive form of medicine, oriented toward health issues people are facing today, needs to do more than dole out diagnoses and treatments. It should give people all the information and tools they need to integrate health concepts into their daily lives so that they can take their life and health into their own hands instead of fatefully having to accept illnesses. I am firmly convinced that this is the right way to respond to the medical challenges of the twenty-first century—and if need be, this path will be led by dentistry. This may sound unimaginable today, but tomorrow we might just start getting used to the idea. In the not-too-distant future, my hope is that this way of thinking will become completely normal.

Let the healing begin!

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